<>1855ja:Shimoda | After losing all but the ship Diana
(1806:1812:GO) to needs of the Crimean War, and after great earthquake and tidal wave
leveled Shimoda and shipwrecked Diana [Beasley, MHJ:61], in 1855fe07 Putiatin
arranged Treaty of Amity (Nichiro Washin Joyaku). Modelled on Kanagawa treaty, recently
signed by USA Commander Matthew Perry [KEJ,4:179.
PHandG:782]. Lensen thinks Shimoda "provisions" are "more extensive"
than Kanagawa [KEJ,6:270]. "Went beyond" by
opening 3 ports [KEJ,6:341]. Opened Shimoda, Hakodate,
and Nagasaki to Russia, but only for ship repairs and provisioning. BUT did allow posting
of consuls at Hakodate or Shimoda Russia chose Hakodate and established reciprocal
extra-territoriality. Kurils divided so that Japan held those islands south of Iturup
(Etorofu); Russia, those north of Urup (Uruppu) [KEJ,6:270
Lensen. I think he means "S FROM" and "N FROM". NB!:Kurils divided N
of Etorofu (KEJ,2:238 Stephan)]. Sakhalin a
"common possession" (Lensen) or "jointly occupied" (Stephan)
[Harrison, Japan's N.Frontier]. Lensen feels that "relations between Russian
residents, mostly personnel of naval vessels wintering in Japan, and local inhabitants
were on the whole amicable. As military men, Japanese officials could identify more
readily with monarchist naval officers than with merchants or with missionaries [KEJ,6:341]. Lensen
goes too far to put Russia in good light. Says 1st lessons in European shipbuilding from Putiatin's stranded crew, but
cf.PH&G:766 re.Adams "Anjin"

<>1855my08:Heda, NW coast of Izu Peninsula | Putiatin
and 40 men were moved to Heda, built European-style schooner in partnership with Japanese craftsmen, and
departed for Russia from Japan (took 2 wks) [KEJ,6:270]

That year novelist Ivan Aleksandrovich Goncharov began serial publication of
his Fregat Pallada (1858:book publication) about his experience with Putiatin in Japan

Goncharov mocked and ridiculed Japanese in a most unfortunate manner. "It was difficult to look without
laughter at these skirt-clad figures with their little topnots and their bare little
knees". Lensen says that G's portrait of Japan as "ludicrous and effeminate" was very damaging
\\
*--KEJ,3:46
*--Lensen"Historicity

<>1855je16:San Francisco Journal carried article by
the German traveler Julius Frobel which stressed parallel rise of USA and Russia

Frobel later wrote memoirs of his travels to the New World, Frobel, Julius, 1805-1893 Seven years' travel
in Central America, northern Mexico, and the far West of the United States (London:1859) F1409.F92

<>1855oc13:1857my21; French intellectuals Edmund and Jules
Goncourt kept diary of everyday life in Paris in which they reflected on the inferiority
of women [P20:14]

<>1856:1870; Italian unification under the leadership of
Camillo di Cavour and Giuseppe Garibaldi

Italian unification was a complex 14-year process of gathering widely different jurisdictions under single
governmental administration

Unification was not complete until Rome and the Vatican City were brought under the authority of the
new Italian liberal monarchy [MAP]

"Italy", the nation-state, made its late appearance on the
historical stage [DPH:187-91]

The several signatories to the treaty -- France, England, Turkey, Sardinia,
Russia, Austria, and Prussia -- agreed to
neutralization of Black Sea, open to all commercial fleets but closed to all military navies

Russia, as the "defeated party", was forced to agree to this strategically disarming clause

Moldavia and Wallachia became semi-independent states under Ottoman Turkish suzerainty

Russia was furthermore forced to cede the mouth of the Danube River and Bessarabia [later known as Moldova] to Romania

All the lower Danube placed under the authority of an international commission

Russian imperial advance in Ottoman Turkish Central-Asia was hereby pushed back, and its influence over
the largely Romanian-speaking territories of Moldavia, Wallachia and Bessarabia was neutralized

This had the effect of hindering simple bilateral Russian/Ottoman accommodation with one another. Instead =

Ottoman Turkey was now declared to be part of what was called the "European concert" and its
integrity protected as such

NB! the implication that Russia could not now be considered a part of Europe

Ottoman Turkey became a part of the "Concert of Europe"
in the effort to keep its imperial domains from becoming a part of Russia

In truth, the Crimean War and the intensification of "the great game"
marked the end of the 1814-1854 "Concert of Europe"

We see here an early adumbration of the notion that the ambitions of "The West" promised salvation from
the ambitions of "Oriental Despotism"

Russian imperialist ambitions were conspicuously damaged while the imperialist ambitions
of "The West" were conspicuously advanced

On the long duration of the concept "The West" (and derivative expressions, EG="Westernization")
hop back to the early beginnings of "The West" LOOP

Increasingly these loose concepts were used to reference powerful and rapidly modernizing (IE=Industrializing) northwestern
European nation-states in their domineering or imperialist relationship to the rest of the world

//
*--John H. Gleason, The Genesis of Russophobia in Great Britain (1950)
*--Richard Elrod, "The Concert of Europe..." [E-TXT]

<>1856mr30:Only 12 days after the signing of the
Treaty of Paris [above], Russian Emperor Alexander II advised Moscow aristocrats gathered in their provincial
noble assembly, "It is better to abolish serfdom from above than to await the time when it will begin to
abolish itself from below" [VSB,3:589 | DPH:282]

Noble assemblies were institutions created in the time of Catherine
II [ID]

These aristocratic "corporate" or soslovie-based institutions responded
in hope and fear to Alexander's dramatic announcement

Russian landowning elites now entered into a brilliant, yet futile -- perhaps we could say final -- period
of corporate or "class-conscious" political action

Newspaper reports on this Moscow Noble Assembly alerted reading public to the immediate
possibility of significant reform

1858su:Nizhnii-Novgorod and Moscow nobles heard addresses by Alexander II on same theme
[VSB,3:591]

Internal Ministry official Aleksei Levshin and Senator Yakov Solov'ev described the background
to reforms [VSB,3:589-91]

At the autocratic center, in Petersburg, the Main Committee and Editorial Commission laid the
groundwork for abolition of serfdom [VSB,3:591-3]

A wide range of root and branch reform initiatives got under way in tsarist ministries

What might this suggest about the status of
the landowning aristocracy as a "ruling class" in Imperial Russia?

What might this suggest about the motivations of tsarist authorities as they launched the reform epoch?
\\
*--Mironov,2:366-81 says that tsarist officials
and other Russians were motivated by comparison of Russia with
its west European neighbors. Mironov places the opening of the half-century reform era prior to WW1 (up
to 1914) in its broad comparative European context

<>1856de01:USA WDC |
Jefferson Davis, USA Secretary of War (1853-57) and future president of the
rebellious Confederacy, addressed new challenge faced by a dispirited and idle
US military, scattered across the Great Plains in small, vulnerable forts
without a specific mission appropriate to its size and ambition as generated
in the Mexican-American War [ID]

Davis understood the close parallel of frontier and imperialist expansion.
He said
=

The occupation of Algeria by the French presents a case having much parallelism to
that of our western frontier, and affords an opportunity of profiting by their experience.
Their practice, as far as understood by me, is to leave the desert region to the
possession of the nomadic tribes; their outposts, having strong garrisons, are established
near the limits of the cultivated region, and their services performed by large
detachments making expeditions into the desert regions as required
[Webb,Great Plains:194-5 & ff.]

1855mr03:Davis had gotten $30,000 from Congress to experiment with camels in TX

1858:Davis was the first to propose construction of a railroad to the Pacific Ocean

He considered it a military necessity and thus a government project, that is, it required
government subvention (monetary support) of private enterprise

Davis arranged for government survey of 4 possible routes

Davis understood the military-industrial closeness of frontier (imperialist?) expansion and the development
of railroads

As USA was poised to open its own industrial era of railroad construction and to launch
a campaign into the Great Plains against the Native Americans who lived
there, it was temporarily diverted by the disasters of the great Civil War

<>1857my10:1858au02; India
| Sepoy Rebellion ushered in brutal year of imperialist war which pitted England against an Indian independence movement

Prominent English cultural figure, John Ruskin [ID] , delivered
a speech characteristic of British imperialist attitudes toward those who resisted their power =

Since the race of man began its course of sin on this earth, nothing has ever been done by it so
significative of all bestial, and lower than bestial degradation, as the act [of]
the Indian race in the year that has just passed by" [2011au19:TLS:3]

And all this just as a new breed of industrial company moved to the center of European economic life, as
epitomized by the new railroad companies [ID]
and transnational grain and petroleum corporations

<>1857oc11:Nagasaki | Putiatin was back from China
where he was working to create a new generation of treaties more favorable to Russia than the
old Nerchinsk Treaty. He found no word from Edo

1857oc16:Nagasaki officials decided to move ahead in their dealings with
Putiatin, using the Dutch proposal as prototype

Week later Putiatin signed similar treaty, w/promise that
another port than Shimoda would be opened

Putiatin soon had some imperialist success in China, and
Russian imperialist ambitions in Asia mounted as the 19th century wound down
\\
*--Beasley,MHJ:65

<>1857:1870; In London political exile, the
pundit Alexander Herzen was beyond the grip of Russian censorship and free to publish and circulate back in Russia
his influential journal of opinion and political news, Kolokol [The Bell] for 13 years, until his
death [KMM:165-90 | RRC2,2:321-31 | Excerpts:
Edie,1:328-78 |
VSB,2:582-4]

1851:Paris | Six years before the appearance of
Kolokol, Herzen explained to Europeans that Russia had a long and
progressive revolutionary tradition, "Du développment des idées revolutionnaires en Russie" [KMM:158-64]

Herzen defended Russia from standard west European clichés repeated in Michelet's writing

Herzen insisted, "The time has come to show Europe that they cannot speak about Russia as of
something mute, absent, and defenseless"

Herzen's critical and radical patriotism, his insistence that Russia was as able as Europe to reach for the better future,
and especially his inclination to idealize Russian village political tradition,
inspired the "populist" movement

1858:Herzen wrote of Russia and America: “Both -- from different direction -- reached across awesome expanses,
building towns, settlements, and colonies, to the shores of the Pacific Ocean, the ‘Mediterranean of the future’”

1859:"Russian Germans and German Russians" offered more critique of "The West" [VSB,3:635-6]

<>1858:London exile, as a result of unsuccessful
radical republican political activism in Italy, provided
Guiseppe Mazzini the opportunity to
publish a theoretical and political journal, Pensiero ed Azione [Thought and Action]

Both Dobroliubov and Chernyshevskii were sons of Orthodox priests, but they made their careers and
gained great popularity because of their broad-ranging "muckraking" journalism and advocacy of
a "modern" secular, science-based world view

Because of censorship, philosophical (especially secular), political-economic
and social issues had to be disguised as literary criticism

He also developed a deep interest in contemporary European political-economic thought and its efforts to understand
the geographically expanding industrial transformation of traditional agrarian civilization and the rise of the
historically unprecedented social formation wage-labor

Chernyshevskii was an outstanding example of the new "public intellectual" in
European life, filled with confidence in science and progress and the need to
propagate their virtues among the educated public, and this in order to solidify or promote the growth of
a modern secularized civil society

Mid-century pundits or journalists put themselves in competition with censors

Official censorship, whether state or Church censorship, was the traditional institution
of control and maintenance of prevailing establishmentarian world views [ID]

But now there was a growing university-trained reading public, fed by a growing popular press

The 1860s have been called "The First Russian Revolutionary Situation"
which was provoked when Alexander II and his administration decided they could no longer allow themselves to govern
as they had in the past

An emerging "civil society" sought political and social reforms well beyond
anything the state could accept, simply because the causes that inspired civili
society were not the causes that inspired official reform

Samuel Smiles, Self Help; With Illustrations of Conduct
and Perseverance[TXT]
The second chapter described the personal traits that promoted remarkable
success of capitalist/manufacturing/engineering leaders, heroes appropriate to this new
industrial age, up-to-date secular variation on older Christian tradition, "lives of
saints" [EG]

Russian military finally captured Shamil and exiled him to estates near Kaluga in Russia

As a show of deep respect, Russian authorities granted him a Russian noble title
[pix#1 | pix#2]

In 1870, Shamil was near death and was permitted to travel to Mecca where 1871mr:Shamil died, ending
an epic that began in 1830fe04

Caucasus Viceroy and commander of the Russian army there, Field Marshal Prince
Aleksandr Bariatinskii, outlined his vision of Russian imperialism in the Caucasus
[VSB,3:607-10]

1859jy10:He urged restoration of the indigenous aristocracy
and strengthening the role of Russian Orthodoxy among the population as a
counter-measure against the popular, almost democratic, influence of the
Islamic clergy

1862de:He now urged Russian authorities "to administer each nationalitiy
with affection and complete respect for its cherished customs and
traditions". He emphasized that "the education of native women is, of
course, of prime importance". In addition, he proposed careful diplomatic
consultations with the Turks to facilitate easy migration into Ottoman lands
for Islamic malcontents on Russian held lands

The Great Game heated up, but small shafts
of hopeful light appeared now and again in the tense Russian/Turkish
interface

Russian cultural figures mobilized to promote the interests of the creative
arts and of the professionals who created art

In this same year several important, nation-wide voluntary societies were organized with purposes that ran
parallel with the Muscial Society.EG =

The Literary Fund

the Political-Economic Committees of the Free Economic Society and the
Russian Imperial Geography Society, and hundreds of individual Sunday Schools, soon coordinated by
a Literacy Committee of the Free Economic Society

These expanding societies had as their objective to wrest control over national
mentalities exercised until now by an autocratic and bureaucratic
authority, to abolished censorship in high culture, to engage as an active
public with the huge political-economic issues
arising with modernization, and to bring literacy and other appropriate
forms of primary education for the first time to the millions of "common folk"

A table illustrates growth of voluntary societies into this period =
[pix]

A second table illustrates ups and downs in the turbulent 1860s = [pix]

William Quantrill [ID] raided Lawrence
KS before the vigilante force, made up of Brown and his sons, could bring relief

Brown’s fundamentalist Calvinism, heavily influenced by the images of Old-Testament prophet-warriors, inspired Brown
to wage holy war against slavery

Those who followed him were soon involved in their own border raids

They rode into the claims along Pottawatomie Creek, seizing and killing four pro-slavery settlers (who had no
direct role in the border raids, such as Quantrill's)

Brown subsequently also became involved in the planning of an African-American
Republic, but grew tired of political debate = "Talk! talk! talk! That will never free the
slaves. What is needed is action -- action."

And that action took place at Harper's Ferry. John Brown expected wide-spread slave rebellion to follow

Or did he seek martyrdom in an ill-planned and poorly executed military assault?

Reinforcements eventually defeated Brown’s forces

1859de02:VA Charlestown | John Brown was hanged, but not
before he handed a prison guard the following prophetic note =

I John Brown am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land: will
never be purged away; but with Blood. I had as I now think: vainly
flattered myself that without verry much bloodshed; it might be done. [2005my12:NYR:14-17]

1942:John Steuart Curry: The Tragic Prelude [to the US Civil
War]
[Original on the Kansas State House wall, Topeka KS]

<>1860:Siberia | Vladivostok founded
*1860:Asia (Map of Eurasia showing its Political Divisions and also the
various Routes of Travel between London and India, China and Japan), S. A. Mitchell, New General Atlas
[UO has 1880 edtion]
*--This decorative map represents an early use of the the term
"Eurasia". It includes the Russian Empire, south to India and east to the Philippine and
Japanese Islands

<>1860my31:Russian Imperial State Bank was established. It became
the greatest commercial bank in the Empire, but it was slow to come alive in the
Russian national economy which was itself slow to come alive since it was not
given the sort of close attention other areas of "great reforms" got =

The activities of the State Bank of the Russian Empire may be divided into two periods. During
the first period (from 1860 to 1894) the State Bank was largely an auxiliary institution of the
Finance Ministry. Most of the State Bank resources were absorbed by direct and indirect financing
of the Treasury. It was vested with the functions pertaining to the Finance Ministry
apparatus: conducting the [emancipation-related] buy-out transactions and handling all paperwork related to them, propping
up the state mortgage banks, and so on. Until 1887 the State Bank settled the accounts of pre-reform
banks. All settlement operations were conducted at the State Treasury’s expense, which was debtor
to these banks, but since the budget deficit made it impossible for the Treasury to provide the
necessary funds, until 1872 the State Bank annually used a large part of its commercial profits
for these purposes. [W
SOURCE]

Gentry landlord and peasant -- the two bookends that held
Imperial social/service hierarchies upright -- both had reason to be discontented with the
terms of emancipation, this greatest of the great reforms =

Expropriated gentry lands and village lands were granted to peasants through their village societies,
rather than to peasant households

Peasants were saddled with redemption payments
which were too high (greater than the productive value of the often inferior
lands distributed) and charged 6% interest on unpaid principle. Immediately,
peasants fell into arrears

The newly created Imperial State Bank was
preoccupied with the ineffective fiscal dimensions of gentry compensation
and peasant redemption payments. It was distracted from larger national
financial needs in its earliest operations

More on peasant disturbances among recently "emancipated" serfs, and other forms of mass
response to the greatest of the Great Reforms [VSB,3:603-5]

Emancipation did not solve the ages-old problem of serfdom, nor did USA emancipation solve
the problems caused by slavery, but both great legislative moves brought an
end to bound labor in both Russia and
USA. [SWH:300-15 contains comparative primary
documents, especially petitions from freed serfs and slaves]

One of the most important long-term historical consequences of
Russian serf emancipation in 1861 was the transformation of an unfree rural soslovie
[formally defined social class (ID)] into free village
laborers

The imperial state continued to enforce and defend traditional divisions of the
imperial Russian population into these five "medieval" sosloviia

And the state pressured peasants to continue to live within traditional village
institutions and practices

But in truth, the state wholly remodeled those village institutions and practices along statist lines

The state's own reforms were tearing apart rotten social/service hierarchies, but at the same time
officials made strenuous effort to preserve ancient social divisions

Emancipated village laborers in Russia are best not called "workers" or "proletariat"
so long as they stayed "down on the farm" and worked the fields

Villagers were not allowed to travel away from their villages without receiving an "internal
visa" or passport

It seems best to call these post-emancipation villagers "peasants" [peasant LOOP]

Some post-emancipation Russian peasants did manage to drift away from village community
ways

Those who drifted away contributed to the rise of a new social class, a "laboring class"
or "wage-labor"

These either hired out their labor in agricultural pursuits or became hirelings
in newly appearing industrial enterprises

In the 1860s, Russia and USA both were beginning to experience a general European (and soon
universal) social/economic novelty, the proletariat

As other nations entered the industrialization process, they too had to confront a challenge
that intensified in the second half of the 19th century = [labor LOOP]

Unlike west Europe and USA, Russia did not experience a powerful new liberal "middle
class", the "bourgeoisie"

The "bourgeoisie" and the "proletariat" were the two novel 19th-century social classes

They both arose out of the smashed structures of medieval "commoner" class and under conditions of
modern industrial economic life

The bourgeoisie was the class that benefited most obviously from industrialization and pushed to
abolish all vestiges of the medieval past

The weak appearance of something like a bourgeoisie in Russia is an important social component of Russian
politics in the "era of great reforms" and the "revolutionary situations"

But Russia was significantly very much like west Europe in its rush to extract advantages from
expanding imperialist exploitation of peoples and regions at the periphery of imperialist power

For Imperial Russia as for England, France and the other widely expansive European states, the
vaunted "progressive" features of "Western" bourgeois capitalist industrialization (EG="free labor" or
wage labor, representative government, liberal civil rights, etc.) played essentially no role in those
peripheral regions subjected to projected European power

Sanderson,Follow:248-9 argues that whaling had little influence on the course of history.
When petroleum came to replace it, "the whole business just petered out without leaving any outstanding imprint
on the world" (249)

Thus, the herds were slaughtered and left to rot with only baleen extracted

Several whale species were nearly extinguished as the 19th century wound down
\\
*2014:|>Doyle,Don H|_The_Cause of All Nations: An International History of the American Civil War
*--[W]
*--Saul,1:322-85

<>1861jy04:Russian
great reforms included a new vodka tax-farm system (Polozhenie o piteinom sbore and other financial reforms [RA2:144f and 191f])

The swift arrest and
exile of one author, Mikhail Mikhailov, could not be mentioned in the legal
press. All efforts to do so were censored = [pix]

1861jy01:London| Ogarev composed the revolutionary proclamation "What Do the People Need?"
["Chto nuzhno narodu? (GRV:198-201)] which circulated widely in Russia, beginning at this time

Soon student disturbances forced officials to close most universities. Herzen advised
"Go to the people!" [VSB,3:636]

"Civil society" was getting impatient, increasingly ready for bold action just months after
the great serf emancipation [ID]. Over the next half century, Russians came to view
expressions of discontent within universities and other institutions of higher learning as a sensitive
barometer of wider, educated public opinion

Especially noteworthy is its concentrated assault on the evils of the
enforced social/service hierarchies (i.e., soslovie
and chin, the superannuated medieval social estates and absolutist bureaucratic
structures created by the Table of Ranks)

Elite resistance failed, but continued to inspire
social-political activists for decades to come
[EG]

The futile and grand initiative in Tver harmonized with the views of many Russian gentry
landowners and with the emerging urban civil society
\\
*--Mironov,1:397-424 describes the evolution of gentry corporations
from the 18th to the 20th centuries

Turgenev offered his famous definition of "nihilist" in chapter five [cf. DIR2:298-302]

A distorted version of the term "nihilist" evolved in the public imagination

This very distortion quickly worked its way as such into the vocabulary of Russian and then world
political culture

Reactionaries sought not only to demonize and constrain a vigorous public mobilization
which supported and urged more state reform

They also sought to choke off the modern inclination toward scientific or experimental/rational
ways of thinking about the world

The scene in chapter five portrays two older brothers, Nikolai and Pavel, who
live on Nikolai's gentry estate in modest, old-fashioned, aristocratic comfort. Peasant servants
cater to their daily needs

Nikolai's son, Arkady, and his friend,
Bazarov, were visiting the estate on break from university studies

Uncle Pavel spoke at breakfast. Arkady described Bazarov as a "nihilist" in
the conversation that followed

The old gentlemen-gentry, Nikolai and Pavel, were confounded, and a serious distortion of meaning arose

SAC Editor has entered in brackets a couple of interpretive elaborations =

"Where have I heard that name before, Bazarov? Nikolai, don't you remember, there was a surgeon called
Bazarov in our father's division."

"I believe there was."

"Exactly. So that surgeon is his father. Hm!" [Pavel sought to establish Bazarov's lineage, his
bona fides in familiar old-regime terms of social/service eminence and
rank] Pavel Petrovich pulled his mustache. "Well, and Monsieur Bazarov, what is
he?" he asked in a leisurely tone.

"What is Bazarov?" Arkady smiled. "Would you like me to tell you, uncle, what he really is?"
["really is" rather than "seems to be" as defined in old-regime terms]

"Please do, nephew."

"He is a nihilist!"

"What?" asked Nikolai Petrovich, while Pavel Petrovich lifted his knife in the air with a small piece
of butter on the tip and remained motionless.

"He is a nihilist", repeated Arkady.

"A nihilist", said Nikolai Petrovich. "That comes from the Latin nihil, nothing, as far as I can judge; the word must mean a man who . . . who believes in
nothing?"

"Better to say 'who respects nothing' ", interposed Pavel Petrovich and lowered his knife with the butter on it.

"Who regards everything from the critical point of view", said Arkady.

"Isn't that exactly the same thing?" asked Pavel Petrovich.

"No, it's not the same thing. A nihilist is a person who does not bow down to any authority, who does not accept
any principle on faith, however much that principle may be revered."

"Well, and is that good?" asked Pavel Petrovich.

"That depends, uncle dear. For some it is good, for others very bad."

"Indeed. Well, I see that's not in our line. We old-fashioned people think that without principles, taken
as you say on faith, one can't take a step or even breathe.Vous avez change tout cela; may God
grant you health and a general's rank, and we shall be content to look on and admire your . . . what was the
name?"

[Here Pavel used an awkward term for "Hegelians", Gegelisty
(rather than the more proper Gegel'iantsy). This allowed a sononorous
mocking of Gegelisty among the fathers (his own cohort) and nigilisty among the
children (Bazarov and Arkady). Pavel wrapped up his interrogation =]

"We shall see how you will manage to exist in the empty airless void; and now ring
up the servant girl, please, brother Nikolai, it's time for me to drink my cocoa."

The settled ways of these old landed noble elites faced great uncertainty
as modernizing reform picked up steam

This was the first summer after serf
emancipation, and the countryside was unsettled all around
[ID]

Unrest was also evident in big cities. In the coming fall, student rebellion was going to
force closure of Russian universities [EG]

Turgenev's text is permeated with the emotions of a prevalent "identity crisis" caused by modernizing change

For the Russian reading public, the rustic ways of Nikolai's gentry estate
seemed a becalmed island encircled by inevitable but perilous change

In this setting, Pavel's cocoa habit might seem a symbol of hide-bound and callous
indifference

By the mid-1860s, grandee elites, police officials and others who dreaded impending reform
had fashioned the meaning of the term "nihilist" in public discourse in such a way that it served as a
scare-label for all progressive action and opinion, especially that of the young

That's how Uncle Pavel saw it, even after Nephew Arkady tried to correct
him

1867:Dym [Smoke = Translated
TXT | 1919:USA radical John Reed Introduction [TXT]
The book hinted at east European revolutionary movements

1876:Nov' [Virgin Soil =
Translated TXT], a story based on
the populist revolutionary movement of the day [ID]

Turgenev was probably the most widely read and publicly
influential of the Golden-Age novelists, even if he was not perhaps the greatest
of these [EG#1 | EG#2]
\\
*--Julicher: chapter 9
*--Saul,2:167-213, 225-31
*--Victor Ripp, Turgenev's Russia, from Notes of a Hunter to Fathers and Sons (1980)

<>1862sp:Mysterious fires burned large
sections of Petersburg, causing wide-spread panic and providing a pretext for
harsh state action against social activists
*--Officials encouraged public outrage by leaking
suggestions that the fires were set by "nihilistic" university-student arsonists
*--Whether moderate or radical, whether connected with the fires or not,
hundreds were detained, warranted for arrest, and sent into political exile

<>1862my:Revolutionary proclamation "Young Russia"
written by the headlong student radical of gentry background, Petr Zaichnevskii [VSB,3:639-41
| Rooney]
*--Another proclamation appeared in these days which was very different from
Zaichnevskii's = Chernyshevskii composed "Salute
to the Gentry-owned Peasants from their Well-wishers..." [Kimball resumé of contents | Russian
TXT]
\\
*--VRR

Industrial mechanization of farming was making
remarkable progress [pix]

1862jy02:Morrill Act[TXT] eventually created 69
state colleges. These 'land acts" were components of an emerging plan for
national economic modernization in which the railroad was the first giant
organizational expression =

1862jy01:USA Pres. Lincoln signed Pacific Railway Act, approving an act
of Congress which was anticipated by the Homestead Act and proposed "to aid in the construction of a railroad
and telegraph line from the Missouri River to the Pacific Ocean."

Section 3 of said act provided "that there be, and is hereby granted to the said
company * * * * every alternate section of public land, designated by odd numbers, to the
amount of five alternate sections per mile on each side of said railroad, on the line
thereof, and within the limits of ten miles of each side of said road, not sold, reserved,
or otherwise disposed of by the United State, and to which a pre-emption or homestead
claim may not have attached, at the time the line of said road is definitely fixed."
Mineral lands were exempted, and all lands not sold or disposed of by said company within
three years after the completion of the entire road were to be subject to settlement and
pre-emption, like other lands at a price not exceeding $1,25 per acre, to be paid to said
company.

Section 4 provided that whenever said company completed forty consecutive
miles of any portion of said railroad, the President of the United States should
appoint three commissioners to examine the same, and report to him in relation
thereto; and upon satisfactory information to him of the completion of forty
miles, patents should be issued conveying the right and title to said lands to
said company, on each side of the road, as far as the same was completed, to the
amount aforementioned; and patents were in like manner to be issued on the
completion of each forty mil

Section 5 provided that in addition to the issuance of patents to lands to the company
upon the completion of each forty miles, the Secretary of the Treasury was also to issue
to said company, bonds of the United States of $1,000 each, payable in thirty years after
date, bearing six per cent per annum interest, to the amount of sixteen of said bonds per
mile for such section of forty miles; and to secure the repayment to the United States of
the amount of said bonds, together with all interest thereon which may have been paid by
the United States, the issue of said bonds and delivery to the company were to constitute
a first mortgage on the whole line of the railroad, together with the rolling stock,
fixtures and property of every kind and description

The act specified the official charge to newly formed industrial companies,
The Union Pacific Railroad and
all of its subsidiaries

<>1862je06:China suffered further refinement of open ports and
open cities policies imposed by imperialist forces -- England, Russia, France, and the Netherlands
*--Two decades later, a new imperialist power, Japan,
upset the balance among those imperialist nations that fed on China
*--Old European imperialist powers were in any event themselves growing restless
with the status quo in the far east
\\
Beasley,MHJ:80

<>1862su:Russian
activist members of fledgling "educated public" were arrested by the hundreds,
usually on trumpted up charges (EG= Chernyshevskii and Nikolai Serno-Solov'evich).
Leading print-media publications were suppressed (EG= Sovremennik[ID])

Sometimes called "the Iron Chancellor", Bismarck created a nation-state out of political patchwork of Protestant,
German speaking peoples in north central Europe, under Prussian dominance and with capital
in Berlin [MAP]

A few days after he assumed his new post, he delivered a speech with the famous line, "The great questions
of the day will not be settled by speeches and majority decisions, but by blood and iron"

He lifted himself above the political concepts of the post-Napoleon world -- the radical, liberal, conservative, or
reactionary ideologies -- in favor of Realpolitik [practical politics, actual POLITICAL policies]

<>1863:French artists rebelled against the cultural
establishment when they opened an exhibit, "Salon des refusés",
comprising works refused for official display
*--This marked the beginning of the
profoundly influential "impressionist" era in European graphic arts, lasting a
quarter of a century
[W]
*--Some call the epoch that followed the
"post-impressionist" era

Polish "freedom fighters" tried to enlist the Russian political opposition
into their struggle in a effort to create an uprising in the middle Volga basin

The "Kazan Conspiracy" was designed to create a diversion, perhaps a "second
front", forcing Russian authorities to commit resources to suppress both a
Polish and a Russian uprising

The Conspiracy was a flop, in part because nearly all Russian activists refused to be a part of it

The central question was this = Were Polish activists after the same things as Russian activists?
\\
*--R.F. Leslie, Reform and Insurrection in Russian Poland, 1856-1865
*--Joseph Wieczerzak, A Polish chapter in Civil War America; the effects of the January insurrection
on American opinion and diplomacy
*--VRR, ch.12 about the Kazan Conspiracy

Earlier, at the end of the Nicholas-era, Katkov was replaced as editor of the major Moscow daily
newspaper, Moskovskie vedomosti [Moscow News]

Over the seven years since then the newspaper in the hands of progressive journalists became a
strong voice of an emerging "public"

Now Katkov was returned to control over the powerful newspaper and, with state subventions and
support, he launched a crusade against progressive public opinion and self-organization

He gained control also over the monthly journal Russkii vestnik [Russian messenger] and
turned it to the same establishmentarian cause

In collusion with officials in the censorship bureaus and with Interior
Minister Valuev, Katkov was one of the first allowed to discuss openly
the émigré Alexander Herzen and his popular publications

Katkov was allowed to do what censorship allowed no other Russian writer
or publication to do because he attacked Herzen relentlessly

Katkov made great effort to link Herzen with Polish
rebellion -- to link critical-minded political dissent with sedition in general -- and to link every expression
of social/political independence among the Russian public with sedition

The influence and authority of Russian mass media -- both official and
independent publishing outlets -- continued to grow [ID]
\\
*--Karel Durman, The Time of the Thunderer: Mikhail Katkov, Russian Nationalist Extremism, and
the Failure of the Bismarckian System, 1871-1887 (1988)
*--Michael R. Katz,. Mikhail N. Katkov: A Political Biography, 1818-1887 (1966) [noUO]
*--Louise McReynolds, News Under Russia's Old Regime: The Development of a Mass-Circulation Press (1991)

<>1863ap13:Russian Interior Minister Petr Valuev submitted
memo on the relationship of state and society, a statist version of "civil
society" [Raeff2:122-131

Valuev was a master of
political "co-optation", that is, the harnessing of independently
mobilized social energy to officially authorized tasks

Valuev also led the official assault on the spontaneous public movement to
create a nation-wide system of elementary education

For one thing, zemstvos became the institutional home of a significant
liberal oppositional movement
\\
*--Terence Emmons and Wayne S. Vucinich, eds. The Zemstvo in Russia: An Experiment in Local Self-Government
*--Abbott Gleason, Local Opposition to Autocracy, 1864-1905
*--Emerging Democracy in Late Imperial Russia

Gorchakov compared Russian imperialism with general European imperialism, that of "all civilized
states that come into contact with half-savage nomadic tribes without firm social organization".
Here's what he said =

Like USA, France, Holland [Netherlands] and England, Russia felt compelled
to cross its borders and its frontiers to establish "a certain authority over its
neighbors, whose wild and unruly customs render them very troublesome"

Expansion into new territory created another even more remote frontier where yet other "wild and
unruly" peoples begin to cause trouble

Preventive movement outward forced yet further movement, and then further

The choice was to give up or "advance farther and farther into the heart of savage lands"

Russia advanced "not so much from ambition as from dire necessity, where the greatest
difficulty lies in being able to stop" [SAC emphasis]

Compare this argument with the English argument [ID] and with an
early US argument [ID] and a later US argument [ID]

<>1864no:USA CO Ft.Lyon area | In good faith, CO Volunteers
Colonel Edward Wynkoop convinced Native American Cheyenne tribe to place selves under
protection of the US military [Hutton:56]

Shortly, Colorado Governor John Evans and the Colorado Volunteers, under the command of
John Chivington, attacked the peaceful village and declared a war of extermination against
the Cheyenne

The event came to be known as the Sand Creek Massacre and marks the symbolic
beginning of several years of warfare on the Great Plains

The ambush unsettled the whole territory from the Platte.R south to Red.R

Military commander/administrator Philip Sheridan, a well-known Civil War commander, was now
assigned to duties in the war against Native Americans on the Great Plains

He later put stress on the importance of this period in his and his nation's life

He referred to it vaguely as the beginning of Indian harassment of settlers and disruption of stage
and railroad routes [ShePH.vsp,2:282. (03):this number in parentheses
records the order in which Sheridan's memoirs accounted these events]

Sheridan made no mention of the Sand Creek massacre

1864:1870; KS the scene of "Indian troubles" as military shifted its
attention from Civil War and occupation of the defeated South in the era of Reconstruction

1866:Major General William Hazen, a veteran of the Indian wars even before the
Civil War, described his policy outlook: "allot to each tribe, arbitrarily, its
territory or reservation, and make vigorous, unceasing war on all that do not
obey and remain upon their grounds" [Hutton:43]

More than a dozen years later, the trial of Vera Zasulich
confirmed the worse fears of those who opposed this "great reform"\
*--Mironov,2:223-365 puts late Imperial law in the broadest Russian historical
and social context, reaching back to medieval times
*--Richard Wortman, The Development of a Russian Legal Consciousness
*1981ap:JGO:161-84 | T. Taranovski, "The Aborted Counter-Reform: The Muravev
Commission and the Judicial Statutes of 1864"
*--S. Kucherov, Courts, Lawyers and Trials under the Last Three Tsars (NYC:1953)

<>1864de08(NS):Vatican issued Pope Pius IX's "Syllabus
of Errors" [DPH:233-41], including "Errors about civil society, considered both
in itself and in its relation to the Church" [237-9]
*--Other Catholic Church/state documents [241-5]

<>1865:1869; Russian novelist at the dawn of world fame,
Leo Tolstoy
(1828:1910) produced his first great novel War and Peace

Tolstoy was a central figure of the Russian "golden age" in its late novelistic phase, from the 1850s to the 1880s

His most important writings in this "golden age" =

1851:1857; Childhood, Boyhood, Youth (written while serving in the military in the Caucausus)

1854:Sebastopol or Tales of Sevastopol, Crimean War battle reportage in the journal
Sovremennik

1861:1862; Tolstoy on Education and very similar translation (as if a close copy)
Tolstoy on Education: Tolstoy's Educational Writings

1875:1877; Anna Karenina

1884:"Death of Ivan Ilyich"

He outlived the Golden Age, and was possibly even more widely influential in
the Russian "Silver Age" a quarter of a century later
\\
*--Wagar on the Golden Age
of Russia culture [TXT]

<>1865ja11:Moscow noble
(gentry) assembly, following the lead of the great landowner V.P. Orlov-Davydov, addressed
Alexander II with a request that he complete the zemstvo reforms "by calling
together a general assembly of elected representatives from the Russian land"
[VSB,3:616 | "Vsepoddaneishii adres moskovskogo
dvorianstva" (GRV:201-2)]

The Moscow noble assembly presumed that only nobles would elect and be elected

However "establishmentarian" the Moscow assembly was, the nobles gathered there suggested
something quite radical = A national representative political body to complete
the local, district and provincial Zemstvo institutions

Moscow nobles sought to "crown the edifice" of national representative
government, expanding from the grass-roots upward

Officials were shocked to read the following words addressed to Emperor Alexander =

The nobility has always been the firm mainstay of the Russian throne. Not being officials of the
government and not enjoying the rewards that such service brings, doing their duty without remuneration
for the benefit of the fatherland and the public order, these men, by virtue of their very position
within the state [as elected representatives], will have the mission of preserving those moral and
political principles that are so valuable for the people and so necessary for their true
well-being, and upon which rests the structure of the state

<>1865je28:Russian State Council and Interior Ministry
reformed laws on Jewish pale, allowing mechanics, distillers,
brewers, master craftsmen and artisans in general to live anywhere in the Empire [VSB,3:617-18]

<>1866ja03:Russian financial reform
(Vrem. polozh o kontrol [RA2:204f])
*--The deep need for fiscal and military reform was addressed only late in the process
*--Then it had to proceed under the influence of an official reactionary mood that arose
following an attempt on the life of the tsar =

<>1866no24:Russian state peasant reform
*--State peasants represented about half the village population of the Empire
*--This reform preserved their advantages over ex-serfs recently emancipated from private gentry
ownership [VSB,3:620-1]

But the Russian phase of Alaska history did not fade away altogether = A grave with Russian
inscription next to the Kodiak Russian Orthodox Cathedral [pix]

Earlier Russian ambitions through Siberia to the New World gave way now to ambitions directed south and east from Siberia
toward an emerging global hot-spot, Manchuria and Korea

In these years Secretary of State Seward also sought to gain possession of
the Virgin Islands, Canadian British Columbia, and Greenland

Canada also got many long looks from ambitious USA officials in the
time of U.S. Grants presidency

A half century after purchase of Alaska, in a time of domestic US economic crisis, followed soon by
international crisis, the fate of Alaska Territory took another turn
\\
*--Saul,1:185-93, 267-311, 385-96
*--Howard Kushner, Conflict on the Northwest Coast: American-Russian Rivalry in the Pacific Northwest, 1790-1867
(see ch.6: "The Oregon Question and Russian-America")
*2008sp:PNQ#99,2:73-91 | Roxanne Easley, "Demographic Borderlands: People of Mixed Heritage in the Russian American Company and
the Hudson's Bay Company, 1670-1870"
*--Stuart Ramsey Tompkins, Alaska: Promyshlennik and Sourdough (1945)

<>1867ap:Vienna | Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph
declared the Empire divided into a "Dual Monarchy", the Austro-Hungarian Empire
*--The newly created dual monarchy went under several names =
Wki
*--Franz Joseph maneuvered his complex empire into position for its final half-century flare, an adventure that
ended in the catastrophe of WW1

<>1867ap01:India
became Crown Colony as rule of the transnational imperialist corporation, The East India Company,
was brought to an end

<>1867my:Moscow | Second Slav Congress a critical moment in
the shift of Panslavism from cultural doctrine toward Russian
imperialist ideology

National liberation of the "little Slavs" from Ottoman Turkish (and perhaps
Austro-Hungarian) imperialist dominion was a useful idea as Russia
continued to play its role in the Great Game
\\
*--Hans Kohn, Pan-Slavism: Its History and Ideology
*--Donald Fanger, "On the Russianness of the Russian Nineteenth-Century Novel". In
Stavrou.ART:40-56
*--Charles Katsainos, The Theory and Practice of Russian Panslavism in the Light of Russias Expansion
in the Balkans until 1912

<>1867jy20:USA WDC | In anticipation of the
67oc21:Great Council treaty gathering in KS Medicine Lodge, Congress created the Indian Peace Commission

What followed was a growing and one-sided contest between civilian and military government officials =

1867se05:MO St.Louis | General Philip Sheridan left for Ft.Leavenworth KS,
reassigned from military administration of "Reconstruction" in the defeated South

1867oc21:KS Medicine Lodge | Great Council led to the Medicine Lodge
Treaty [W]

1868ja07:WDC | "Report to the President by the Indian Peace
Commission" [TXT]

However, the government had already dispatched Sheridan and almost immediately got underway with
preparations for a massive attack on Native Americans in the plains states

1868fe29:KS Ft.Leavenworth | General William Tecumseh Sherman was now
commander of the Division of the Missouri, consisting of 6000 soldiers in 27 forts

Sheridan took up command of Sherman's department #3 (of 4)

Sheridan distinguished himself in the War Between the States

He was ready now to distinguish himself in the war between USA and Native Americans, even as apparent efforts
at peace-making were under way

1868jy:WDC | Congress finally appropriated $500,000, not to the civilian Indian Agency but
to Sheridan and the military

USA relations with the native nations were now securely in the hands of military and railroad managers

In preparation for the war against Native Americans, Sheridan moved his HQ to KS Ft.Hays, now Union Pacific Railroad
terminus; good depot for supplies, a strategic storage point for the US
cavalry's "commissaries"

"Protection of the railroad was Sheridan's primary
concern" [Hutton:39] [MAP]

1868jy:WY | The army forced Union Pacific Railroad President Thomas Durant to accept
Chief Engineer Grenville Dodge's route for building the railroad further
westward

Dodge was an old comrade of the Civil War military

All were West Point graduates

US President Grant and General Sherman played a role here too [Hutton:40 lxt]

Many motives swarmed around this tragic tale

NB! also military effort to preserve and protect its budgets from demobilization after the Civil War
and "Reconstruction"

For example = 1868:Fifth Cavalry was not demobilized when no longer needed for
"Reconstruction" of the South

Now Sheridan began to attack villages in order to scatter Native Americans

Only policy was that Indians "be soundly whipped, and the ringleaders in the present
trouble hung [i.e., hanged], their ponies killed, and such destruction of their property as will
make them very poor" [Hutton:38]

Sheridan addressed a joint session of TX House and Senate =

These men, the buffalo hunters, have done in the last two years, and will do more in
the next year, to settle the vexed Indian question, than the entire regular army has done
in the last thirty years. They are destroying the Indians commissary; and it is a
well-known fact that an army losing its base of supplies is placed at a great
disadvantage. Send them powder and lead, if you will; but for the sake of lasting peace,
let them kill, skin, and sell until the buffalo are exterminated. Then your prairies can be
covered with speckled cattle, and the festive cowboy, who follows the hunter as a second
forerunner of an advanced civilization. [Rister,No Mans Land:29]

Here Sheridan's military vision foreshadowed the famous but non-military vision of
the Turner Thesis

Sheridan put the matter in the context of expanding USA power rather than expanding USA civilization

Sheridan helps us see that the Turner thesis is able to frame both frontier and imperialist expansion

1868au:se; MO St.Louis |General Sherman turned against the Medicine Lodge Treaty which
had not in any event been ratified, nor had any of the promised gifts and assistance been
given to the Native Americans

Military and civilian authorities were at loggerheads

<>1867au21(NS):North German Confederation's new Reichstag
had delegates August Bebel (1840-1913) and Wilhelm Liebknecht (1826-1900), the first
socialists so elected

<>1868:1912; Japan entered
into industrial modernization in the 44-year era called "Meiji Restoration"
*--Japanese public figures Fukuzawa Yukichi [ID] and
Shibuzawa Eiichi [ID] gave expression to a new
entrepreneurial, industrializing and modernizing ethos [SWH:358-63]
*--In another reflection of late 19th-century global trends, Yamagata Arimoto
[ID] gave expression to a Japanese variation on militant
Chauvinism [ID] [SWH:340-5]\\
*--Black, Cyril E., et al. The Modernization of Japan and Russia: A Comparative Study

Historical Letters explored the choice which the 19th century seemed to present
mankind, a choice between history and science,
between "humanities" (the record of human experience) and the more universalistic laboratory
and math-based ways of knowing

Before arrest, Lavrov was a professor of mathematics and an almost pedantic historian of thought

But now he came down on the side of history

Lavrov sought to counter the hyper-scientism or positivism of Dmitrii Pisarev [ID]

He encouraged youth and the older generation as well to the activist life in
the public realm as "critical-minded individuals"

1856:1866; In the "pre-revolutionary" decade that preceded arrest,
imprisonment, exile, and then commitment to revolutionary struggle, Lavrov inspired a whole generation of thinking
and reading youth [EG]

He described his philosophy as "anthropologism"

By anthropologism, Lavrov did not mean the emerging empirical social science "anthropology"
but a philosophy that put anthropos[ID] at the heart
of all questions about what was real, actual and right

Lavrov emphasized the subjective (the experiential, even very individual)
human foundations of all knowledge

But he also had his way of understanding and respecting the materialist view of the world and the dominant "positivist" trends of his
century

For that he was sometimes accused of being "eclectic" ["cherry picking" among powerful intellectual trends]

But he once wrote that the phrase "I WANT to know" was the matrix of advanced human consciousness. He emphasized
"want" or willful intellectual desire

In his approach to that insight, he had in his time and place little by way of pre-planted
intellectual cherry orchards to pick among

In this way he predicted ways of thinking more common to the century that followed
him, a post-scientistic century, than to any that had come before

1870:In NE Russian exile in Vologda,| Lavrov gave up on receiving a pardon from tsarist officials for
the largely trumped up charges brought against him in 1866 [ID]

He fled from exile and went into west European political emigration in
Paris for
the final thirty years of his life

<>1868:CUBA rebelled unsuccessfully against Spanish
version of European imperialism
*--After the independence revolutions of the 1820s
[ID], Cuba and Puerto Rico were now all that remained
of the Spanish empire in the New World, and a pitiful remainder they were

<>1868:England, London | Herbert Spencer's Social
Statics described a new "social Darwinism" with emphasis on "natural
selection" and the beneficial results that came from "the survival of the
fittest", not just out there in the animal and vegetable world but also in
the social world of humans [CCC2,2:727 | CCC3,2:834]

Social Darwinism influenced anti-welfare and anti-egalitarian politics
around the globe and gave an intellectual justification for some of the suffering that resulted
from "laissez-faire" policies at home and imperialism abroad. It gave scientistic plausibility
to various flourishing forms of militarism as well

The movement that gathered around
this publication and the volatile and now revived old activist Bakunin was a clear sign that the
poet Nikolai Nekrasov was right when he predicted that the policies of the
tsarist state bred revolutionists, not citizens

Years earlier, Bakunin caught European attention during the Revolution
of 1848 [ID], spent time in Siberian
exile, escaped, and more recently rose to prominence in the First International

Now in the final eight years of his life Bakunin began for the first time
to have some influence on social movements in Russia in the era of revolutionary populism here on the
eve of the great "going to the people"
\\
*--VRR, ch.2 on Bakunin and ch.15 on Nechaev

<>1868no26:USA Oklahoma Territories, Washita River |
General George Custer launched surprise winter-season attack on large Native American
village [W][MAP]

Superior logistical strength and a firm resolve to wage aggressive war against all aspects
of Native American life were paying off for Euro-American invaders
\\
*--Hutton:56-76, 99-100 summarizes the Washita winter war with special emphasis on lessons applied there
from the Civil War, for example, from the bombardment of civilian targets in Vicksburg

<>1869:1895; Central-Asia |
Over these thirty years, Turkmen territories were absorbed into the Russian Empire
*--West of the Black Sea, Balkan tensions mounted as relations
deteriorated between Russians and Turks and nationalism
waxed among the Slavic peoples under Ottoman dominion
*--The focus of the Great Game shifted to
south-eastern Europe and began to concentrate on vast transnational economic
issues involved in the coming of the "petroleum era" of global industrialization
[ID]
throughout AfroAsia

<>1869:French democrat Leon Gambetta ran for election and asked electors to draw
up a program for him to follow if elected
*--Gambetta's Belleville Program became a model for French democratic politics for
years [DPH:309-10]

<>1869:English political-economist
John Stuart Mill, "The Subjection of Women"
[TXT]
*--He carried that liberal tradition a great distance
toward emerging European social-democratic views
*--John Stuart Mill was the last representative of the century-long "classical economist" tradition,
but macro-political-economic analysis continued its heavy influence =

<>1869au:German Marxists rejected Lassalle's
radical reformist approach to labor organization, especially its close association with
the Bismarckian state

German Marxists formed an independent Social-Democratic Workers Party [Sozialdemokratische
Arbeiterpartei] and ratified its Eisenach Program [DPH:155-6]

In these years, national workers movements were strengthened by association with an international
labor organization, the First International

Now, in Germany, a political party for the first time based itself on the new
social formation, wage-labor

In Russia this year, Nikolai Flerovskii [Bervi-Flerovskii] published his Condition of the Working Class
in Russia [LDH:253-8]

Bervi-Flerovskii captured the imagination of the Russian reading public with his reportorial
precision and his moral indignation as he described rural, suburban and urban labor conditions

Karl Marx was learning to read Russian so that he might make himself directly familiar with a new
generation of Russian social critics, including Flerovskii

Marx was beginning to see that he had so far neglected or misunderstood the global meaning of
rural wage-labor in un-industrialized or agrarian "modes of production" such as Russia

Marx and Engels made a bold but pseudo-appeal to "workers of the world" in 1848 [ID] without having much
of an idea at all about working people the world around

Marx was in his final years making some effort to overcome this blind spot, to actualize that 1848
appeal to "workers of the world"

He was just beginning to search for better ways to relate his political-economic
views to the non-European industrializing world

Marx's late-life effort was taken up by others

The search for a way to connect the objectives of revolutionary social-democracy to the non-European world
would became a central feature of the global spread of "Marxism"

<>1870:Saint Petersburg Association of Russian Playwrights
formed with Aleksandr Ostrovskii as president

A Century of Russian ballet : documents and accounts 1810-1910

Aleksandra A. Orlova, Musorgsky's days and works: A biography in documents CF= 1859my01

Also, the Peredvizhniki or "Itinerants" or "Company of Itinerant Art Exhibits" formed
[Wki]

EG= see Arkhip Kuindzhi's landscape "After the Storm" [Posle
grozy] 1879
\\
*--Alain Besançon, "The Dissidence of Russian Painting" in CSH:381-411
*--Richard Taruskin, Opera and Drama in Russia: As Preached and Practiced in the 1860s
*--Elizabeth Valkenier, Russian Realist Art: The State and Society; the Peredvizhniki and Their Tradition

<>1870:USA |
About 32 nation-wide labor unions were in existence
*--Workers were organizing themselves in the face of forceful
resistance of industrialists and financiers, and their political allies
*--Self-organized wage-laborers represented a check and
balance on self-organized "capitalists"

Very quickly grain exchange "clubs" or "rings" became active in the
London "Baltic Mercantile and Shipping Exchange"

The Baltic Exchange was founded over a hundred years earlier (1746), but now economic modernization,
especially the growth of industrial urban centers, with huge non-agricultural
populations, "democratized" bread production and created a need to feed swelling
factory-labor populations

The astonishing growth of the urban population in England created a novel situation in which England
was no longer able to produce sufficient agricultural product on the island to feed its exploding population

1895:OR Portland | Frank Peavey built a one million bushel grain elevator and shipped wheat down
the Pacific coast, then overland at the Isthmus of Panama into the Caribbean Sea
and across the Atlantic Ocean to Liverpool, England

Urban reform belatedly expanding upon the Charter for the Towns
of Catherine II [ID]

Russian text Gorodovoe polozhenie... [RA2:232f]

Just as self-administration was apparently promoted now in the countryside (Zemstvo
institutions of self-administration), so also in the cities, in growing modern urban centers

Only one "great reform" remained to be instituted
\\
*--Mironov,1:371-96 deals with the transition from traditional Russian urban communes
and corporations towards something like the modern idea of "community"
*--Hausmann,G

Darwin stated boldly, "The main conclusion here arrived at, and now held by many naturalists who are
well competent to form a sound judgment, is that man is descended from some less highly organized form"

All biological observations, he wrote, "point in the plainest manner to the conclusion that man is the
co-descendant with other mammals of a common progenitor"

He also stated bluntly that the educated person "cannot any longer believe that man is the work of
a separate act of creation"

These three topics took up about half of all instruction time [VSB,3:622-4]

Compare the new elitist Russian elementary and secondary requirements with the knowledge emphasized in
a contemporary but more democratic educational system, the Kansas public-school eighth grade graduation
exam in 1895

This Kansas 8th-grade exam might possibly also provide a comparison of
democratic public education in 19th-century USA with what it had become by
the early 21st century

<>1871fa:1872wi; Russian Grand Duke Aleksei (son of Alexander II) visited USA
and, among other things, hunted Buffalo with General George Custer in Kansas
*--Civil War General William Tecumseh Sherman, more recently commander of prairie Indian Territory, returned the visit
\\Saul,2:54-75

*1872:Brooklyn-born painter John Gast portrayed US movement west,
titled "American Progress" [W]
The action sweeps from right to left, as the bright eastern sky drives dark clouds
ever westward =
We see crowded east-coast ports (the Brooklyn Bridge is discernable) busy with globalized trade
Railroads, stage coaches, and Conestoga wagons course westward, laden with goods and folks from the bustling east
Telegraph lines run into the arms of a provocative angel,
also flying westward. And she carries a book in her arms
Is it a Bible?
No, it's Common School[ID]
Farmers follow miners who follow a trapper, as if to predict and thus confirm the "Turner Thesis" [ID]
In front of this onslaught, buffalo and bear (wildlife) and native savages flee from encroaching brightness of the good future
No obvious presence of
preachers or the US military can be seen
What we see is simply the natural force of secular "American progress"
pressuring Native Americans and their dogs out of the way
Is this not a portrait of the "Westernization" of the "West"?

<>1872:1883; German composer Richard Wagner created
theatre (Festspielhaus) in Bayreuth, Bavaria, where annual music festivals allowed for the first
time proper staging of his massive and revolutionary operas

<>1872de:Zurich | If the venerable rebel Bakunin
was revived in this new era of revolutionary opposition [ID], 47-year-old Petr
Lavrov, ex-artillery Colonel, ex-professor of mathematics, and an aspiring philosopher of notable promise, was now "reborn"
as revolutionary ideologist

<>1873:USA PA Pittsburgh | Scottish-born
immigrant Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919) was now eight years into a brilliant career as
industrialist, concentrated on building a colossal steel manufacturing enterprise

During the US Civil War, Carnegie served as a War Department railway division bureaucrat

He instantly saw an industrial future opening before him

Inspired by his war-time procurement experiences, in 1865 he entered the steel business

Victory of the North in the American Civil War and an associated industrial productivity boom,
especially in railroad construction, launched the careers of several of the most famous entrepreneurs
of modern history, and Andrew Carnegie was among the first in line

In the boom years after the Civil War, Andrew Mellon built mightily on his father’s
fortune, concentrating on banking,
coal, oil, railroads, public
utilities, steel, aluminum, and eventually in the aviation industry

Mellon the younger showed a masterly control of diverse but vertically integrated
economic enterprises

And he understood the central role of finance capital. He subordinated the manufacturing
process itself, and certainly labor, in favor of financial profit considerations

But he also understood the role of governmental power and the sometimes shady political
manipulation of the "free market"

The markets and industrial companies he worked in cannot be described as
altogether "free", or laissez-faire, or simply entrepreneurial, nor can they be
called simply "criminal"

Mellon was an active supporter of the pro-business
and bribe-prone Republican-Party political machine in Pennsylvania

The "Going to the People" was one of the most spontaneous and dramatic confrontations in all of Russian
history between the state, urban elites and the laboring folk in villages and factories

By the hundreds, Russians -- mainly college-age youths -- fanned out into
the countryside to learn about peasant life but also to educate peasants about
their best interests, to encourage peasant mobilization for causes presumed to
be popular

These causes were, for certain, dear to radical youth, but were they dear to villagers?

Some of these crusaders settled into village routine for a period, but others were repelled by
the hostility or indifference of villagers

Nonetheless, the center of attention within democratic circles remained still
peasants

Official policy prevented anything like a "public sphere" to evolve within the tightly restricted
social/service hierarchies [ID]

Now thousands of city folk broke with conventional practices and
spilled out into wage-labor work environments and into the countryside to mix
with and open conversations with the narod [the Russian people; laboring folk]

1873oc:Young urbanite spoke with construction workers about their plight
(as remembered during interrogation after he was arrested)
[TXT]

1875:Justice Minister Konstantin Pahlen
reported that his investigation of the "Going to the People" had so far turned up 770 activists from all "strata" of
imperial society, active in 37 provinces. And these were just the ones snared in official investigations

In Pahlen's view, the failure of students and others to adhere to assigned roles defined
by their "stratum" was a symptom of wide moral decay

Pahlen was shocked to report that students shed themselves of their university uniform,
the outward sign of their stratum, and that they took on the garb of villagers as they attempted to mix freely with them

One soslovie imitating another and unauthorized socializing by any group were illegal in Russia

Pahlen emphasized the broad sympathy for this movement among all strata of Russian society

He expressed amazement that "many persons no longer young, fathers and mothers of families, who enjoy
material security and a more or less honored social position, not only failed to oppose the young people but, on
the contrary, often gave them open encouragement, help, and support"

In Pahlen's view, these folks seemed not to understand that this movement to the people threatened the
very foundations of Russian life

These folks were breaking free of those foundations, namely, the social/service hierarchies

Activists among the folk distributed illegal books and other publications by Russian émigrés abroad
[VSB,3:654-6]

The most characteristic Russian "ideological" trends in the 1870s were associated with Petr
Lavrov, Mikhail Bakunin (with Sergei Nechaev [ID]), and Petr Tkachev

In the early years, populists received much intellectual guidance from the émigré publications
of Alexander Herzen[ID]. But Herzen was now dead

Mikhail Bakunin [ID] and Petr Lavrov sought to replace
him as inspirational theorists and publicists

Bakunin and Lavrov did not quite reach Herzen's level of polemical brilliance, but they were
important émigré revolutionary leaders with Europe-wide reputations

Petr Tkachev's influence on events back in Russia was different from that
of Lavrov, Bakunin and Herzen, but like these others, Tkachev exerted his influence from a distance

These pundits, ideologues and theorists have been lumped together under the term "populism"
[narodnichestvo]

The term is fine so long as we remember that the central concept was radical rural egalitarianism with a good dash of
late-nineteenth-century socialism

Populism [narodnichestvo] was an "ism" based on "the people" [narod, with is wide
implications of "nation", "the people", "peasants" |
TXT on the word "narod"]

Populists were democrats in so far as they put their faith in the possibility that the Russian "people"
(90% of whom were villagers) were in a position to shape their own better future,
much like all other European common folk, whether rural or urban

Not all populists saw things that way. Some populists veered from democracy when
they pondered the possibility that a "backward" people might need the guidance of an
advanced "minority" -- an "intelligentsia" [ID]

Even when it was not always democratic, even when it veered toward managerial elitism, Russian
populism remained at heart radical rural egalitarianism and in stark opposition to
Russian social/service hierarchies

Populists put a lot of faith in the progressive implications of a pre-modern, pre-industrialized, largely rural population

In their view, villagers represented a promise every bit as bright as -- maybe brighter than -- that of
any other European people

Why should one presume that labor ghettos in the big industrialized cities were better able than
the Russian village to produce citizens of a wholly transformed future egalitarian and socialist world?

A bit dreamy, a bit idealistic, but no more so than all other European
progressive radical-liberal or socialist visions of future egalitarianism

Democracy just might be univerally implausible or at least unlikely

Polulists put a lot of faith in the narod

Emerging new and broad public interactions were essential for a democratic future

The political system called democracy could not exist without the social
structures of broad public interaction among the whole people, the whole nation, the narod

Populists put a lot of faith in the narod, but they also put a lot -- maybe a lot more -- faith
in themselves

They were sure that they were the active ingredient in an emerging new social mixture, a new
free socialization among all the people, so unlike historical and exclusive social structures

In just this era, the Russianized Latinate word "intelligentsiia" came into wide
usage [ID]

The spreading use of the words "narod" and "intelligentsia" can very properly be
thought of as a serious subversion of customary Russian imperial social/services hierarchies

But the various deliberations on the relationship of "narod" to
"intelligentsia" also contained fertile seeds of 20th-century Soviet
managerial elitism,
a future radical version of traditional social/service hierarchies

Intelligentsia are often accused of "idalizing" the Russian peasant, but
they were far more often guilty of idealizing themselves

Justice Minister Pahlen had enough sense to know that much of the energy of the epoch flowed from cultural sources far
broader and indigenous than the ideological publications of a few pundits in west European emigration, broader
even than the small and harassed home-bred oppositional movement

An intense nationalistic Russian self-consciousness had long ago attached itself to
the notion of "the folk" [narod], and it flourished in a generalized atmosphere of dissent against
the established and seemingly foreign or "un-Russian" autocratic order

For the second time in Russian history, in the 1860s and 1870s, a wide debate arose on the virtues
and shortcomings, but mainly the virtues, of the peasant village assembly [mirskoi skhod], the
communitarian practices associated with "mutual assurance" [krugovaia poruka -- almost always and
misleadingly translated as "collective responsibility" (ID)]

Very old European community practices survived as nowhere else in Europe

These timeless Russian peasant practices seemed capable of serving as a foundation for the construction of
that bright egalitarian future that so many 19th-century Europeans -- and not only Russians -- expected just around the corner

As an artifact of Russian political culture, idealization of the village assembly
was not unlike that ubiquitous English political-cultural artifact = The idealization of
the Magna Carta and the early parliaments [ID]

It is odd and noteworthy that Russian idealization of the ancient
urban veche [LOOP] was slower to arise, and idealization of
the early-modern Zemskii Sobor [LOOP] was weak

Traditional agrarian ways in Russia, however, also included a whole set of primitive agricultural practices -- strip
farming, three-field system, periodic redistribution of land-holding responsibilities among village households

Redistribution seemed a bit like "socialism", but it also functioned as a sort of "temporary private property",
in which households held land as if their own. [TXT on these village land practices]

As the political struggle of the Russian state with radical political opposition intensified,
the populist movement back in Russia took a turn toward terrorism

Efforts at close contact with peasants and other working folk slackened

\\
*--Mironov,1:286-370 analyses the history of Russian rural social institutions
*--VRR, ch.18 on the group conventionally called "Chaikovtsy"
and the movement "to the people"

<>1874:1896;
German historian and "chauvinist" ideologist Heinrich von Treitschke dealt with the contradictions between
individual freedoms and national unity [ID] by shifting
increasingly in the direction of militaristic and nationalistic "chauvinism"

Treitschke inspired a war-fever even in the final years of the great and peaceful
inter-European 19th century with his influential "Politics" [BNE:143-5 |
CCC3,2:989-1004 | PWT2:258-60]

1882mr11:French intellectual Ernest Renan, who had been a serious Germanophile
prior to the Franco-Prussian War, now turned against Germany, but stopped short of affirming
French nationalism in ethnic or racists terms

In a famous article, "What is a Nation?" [E-TXT], he emphasized group action together, the vast community of national
accomplishment

He also cautioned that a nation can remember its glories, but it also has to learn how to think
about (perhaps forget) its atrocities

Here are some of his words =

Man does not belong to his language or to his race, he belongs
to himself alone, for he is a free being, a moral being. We no longer condone
the persecution of people in order to change their religion; persecuting them to
make them change their language or homeland appears just as evil to us.

What makes a nation is not speaking the same language or belonging to the same
ethnographic group, it is having done great things together in the past and
wanting to do more great things in the future. [...] Language invites unity,
without, however, compelling it. The United States and England, Latin America
and Spain share the same languages, but do not form single nations. Conversely,
Switzerland, so solid because it is based on the consent of its various parties,
has three or four languages. There is in humanity something superior to
language; it is will. The will of Switzerland to be united, despite the variety
of its tongues, is much more important than the similarities often obtained by
means of persecution. [TXT |
RWP2:281-91]

<>1874:USA | John Fiske, Outlines of
Cosmic Philosophy, influenced American religious thinkers on the question of the harmony of the
Christian faith with the Darwinian concept of biological evolution and with its social corollary,
"Social Darwinism"
\\
*--Wagar on Fiske [TXT]

What an amazing and lamentable comparison with the situation as it was when I entered the top echelons of the
government thirteen years ago [1860]. Then everything surged forward; now
everything drags back. Then the sovereign was sympathetic to progress, he moved
things forward himself; now he has lost confidence in everything he himself
created, in everything that surrounds him, even himself [VSB,3:624-5]

1874:1881; Seven years passed without further reforms. The tsarist state
was turning toward reaction

Then one crucial but belated and still-born reform gesture
was made on the very eve of Alexander II's assassination

<>1875:Japan and Imperial Russia in tense
negotiations
*--Japan took northern Kuril Islands in exchange for dropping claims on Sakhalin Island
*--Russia was forced to put the "Far-East" on a back burner in order
to concentrate attentions on a looming crisis in
AfroAsia
\\
*1962:JGO#10:337-48| G. A. Lensen, "Japan and Tsarist Russia: Changing
Relationships, 1875-1917"
*1942:LND| B. H. Sumner, Tsardom and Imperialism in the Far East and Middle East, 1880-1914

<>1876:Japan forced a trade treaty on Korea which
opened two Korean ports
*--As Japanese industrial modernization progressed, so did Japanese imperialist ambitions
*--Japan sought to "Westernize" itself fully

<>1876:USA | Last Federal Troops of occupation left the
South as "Reconstruction" came to an end
*--Philadelphia World's Fair (Centennial Exposition) on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the
American Revolution\\Saul,2:138-43

<>1876:1885; USA and Russia | First decade in
which great transnational petroleum corporations consolidated their grip on that industry =

Was Andrew Carnegie [ID] British or, more exactly, a Scot, or was he an "American"?

1877-1881:USA| Standard Oil "gobbled up" domestic business rivals and began to build network of trunk
and side pipelines

1882:USA oil refining capacity 95% under the control of the giant energy
company Standard Oil, a "trust company"

One great novelty was that Standard became a business well beyond Cleveland, well beyond the borders of Ohio

Standard was a pioneer "transnational corporation"

There were no USA nationally chartered corporations, only state chartered

Of course, there were no "international" charters in this ultra-nationalistic 19th century

Standard expanded beyond the reach of geographically more limited legal and governmental authorities

By the 1880s, kerosene = main product (over 1/2 of all USA oil output; 4th largest USA export)

The European office of Standard Oil boasted that oil "forced its way into more nooks and corners of
civilized and uncivilized countries than any other product in business history emanating from a single
source [i.e., emanating from this vast new transnational corporation]"

Another novelty = "The concept of management by owners had evolved to the policy of management by an
active inside board [Standard Oil Executive Committee]

The Standard Oil Executive Committee met daily to determine which policies and decisions were
in "the general interest" [Gnrg]

In this way, Standard represented the first huge example of the fiduciary problem caused when "ownership" and
"management" are dissociated from one another

Ruth AmEnde Roosa, "Banking and financial relations between Russia and the United States"

A.A. Fursenko, "The oil industry"

2003su:Russian publication with wide circulation offered its views on how the great Rockefeller
and J. P. Morgan industrial/financial empires were built in USA, with explanations of why they eventually
failed [TXT]

The sense of ethnic sodality was strongest among Orthodox Slavs, especially among East Slavic and South Slavic peoples

That sympathy was not shared by the great European powers, especially England and Austria, who were jealous of
growing Russian influence in that part of the world and had their own ambitions there

In fact not all Russians shared that sympathy =

Serbia and its close neighbor Montenegro were earlier declared independent from Turkey

An 1876 Serbian war against Turkey, occasioned by Serbian support of Bosnia-Hercegovina independence,
prompted much public support in Russia

But the war turned ugly for Serbia, helping convince Russia to intervene

At that time, poet and prominent tsarist establishment official, Prince P.A. Viazemskii, criticized the intensity
of Russian enthusiasm for the cause of Serbia and Montenegro =

Let the Serbs tend to their own affairs, and us Russians to ours. This is
indeed our chief error, our chief misunderstanding, that we consider
ourselves more Slav than Russian. [...] Any time now Europe will catch fire,
and a general war will spread. Do [the Slavophiles] really think that Russia
will be strengthened by the resurgence of Slavic nations? Nothing of the sort;
rather the contrary. We shall only ensure and confirm the ill will and ingratitude
of a neighbor whom we have revived and put on his feet. [...] It is better for us
to have as a neighbor a feeble Turkey, old and decrepit, than a young, strong,
democratic Slavic land that will be wary of us but will never love us [... All] their
sympathies are for the West [VSB,3:629]

Turkey and Russia fought and negotiated on their own, without any concern for Austrian or English
interests and, at first, without overt interference from European states to the west

1878mr17:The Russian and Ottoman empires negotiated and signed the bilateral San Stefano
treaty [TXT] [Excerpts DIR2:317-28]

The dominant provision of the San Stefano treaty was creation of an enlarged Bulgaria
[now including a sizable portion of Macedonia, a vaguely defined territory running roughly from the
eastern border of Albania to the Aegean Sea and populated by Bulgarian, Albanian, Greek and many other
Illyrian and Balkan peoples]

The new Bulgaria would be semi-independent and with an elected princely monarch

NB! no Russian authority over Bulgaria was implied

In fact, the new Bulgaria was to pay "tribute" to the Turks

Russia did gain significant territory around the southeast shores of the Black Sea

Bosnia-Hercegovina [Bosna i Hercegovina] were promised reforms from Turkish overlords

NB! B-H was not made independent of the Turks nor given over to Serbia

This area had since medieval times been a rich potpourri of religious confessions

Catholics, Orthodox and Bogomils vied with one another

From 1463 and for the next four hundred years, B-H was ruled by Ottoman Turks

Elites accepted Islam, and thus added another ingredient to the complex
B-H stew

As of 1878, B-H was a fruit on the Ottoman tree that Austria sought to pick

The Russians still thought of it as unripe and made no overt effort in
the San Stefano Treaty to gain advantage there

They simply demanded that the Turks reform their administration

The Austro-Hungarian Empire played the most unsettling role in this
region =

Watching from the sidelines, Austria and other western and central European powers were alarmed at
the extensive provisions of the bilaterally negotiated San Stefano Treaty

Some western European capitals feared a possible re-establishment of the earlier trend toward
rapprochement between traditional rivals, Russia and Ottoman Turkey, a trend that Western allies had
once before
disrupted in the time of the Crimean War [ID]

They feared that Russo-Turkish rapprochement might isolate western and central European powers
and preempt the benefits just for them, benefits "The West" expected to follow from their own careful long-term dismantlement of Turkey

Austrian imperial power had designs on B-H, grander than the modest San Stefano
concessions, yet it was happy to pretend, along with the other "Western empires" (EG=England
and Germany), that it was the Russians who sought unnatural expansion of imperial authority

In view of this portentous bilateral Russian/Turkish diplomatic success, "The West" decided to intervene

They claimed that Russia had overturned the Treaty of Paris [ID] without
sufficient international consultation

Making bald threat of war, a small group of European great powers, with England in the lead, forced a
new treaty on Russia and Ottoman Turkey

Ambitious "Western" powers took this opportunity to alter San Stefano in such a way as to
enhance their own positions in the eastern Mediterranean and to weaken the positions of Russia and Bulgaria
and, for that matter, Turkey itself

They pretended to enhance the position of Ottoman Turkey, but time was
to show that was but a diplomatic ruse

The Berlin Congress followed, a sorrowful inning in the "Great Game"
and a fundamental cause of some of the most tragic 20th- & 21st-century "AfroAsia" crises

<>1877su:USA experienced 45 days of intense
and wide-spread labor unrest when thousands of railroad workers went on
strike [ID]

Some of the nation's biggest cities --
Baltimore [pix],
Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Chicago, St.Louis -- were gripped in violent clashes
between wage-laborers and authorities

These confrontations ending frequently in military intervention and use of live ammunition against strikers

<>1877:1881; Russian second "revolutionary
situation" (4 years) intensified in the months of Russo-Turkish War and expanded
into a crisis of Russian revolutionary populism and the beginnings of modern political parties in Russia

He observed a contest within the highest circles of tsarist state authority

In his view the contest was between authentic reformers and those who now sought to reverse reform
trends, those who dreamt of return to a past never really experienced (perhaps a good definition of political
reaction [ID], in this
case "official reactionary politics")

Two big historical questions =

Did the terroristic revolutionary movement cause the crisis within the
autocratic state and provoke the shift toward reactionary measures?

Or did reactionary measures precede terrorism (and perhaps cause it to appear on the
scene)?

Political ferment was very much alive among émigré Russians

But back in Russia, it is harder to say because unlicensed self organization or voluntary associations of any sort were
illegal, especially political groups

After the unorganized, largely spontaneous "Going to the People" [ID], all
populist oppositional movements were of necessity at first underground and conspiratorial, revolutionary parties

1876fa:Underground political party "Land and Liberty" [Zemlia i volia] issued its first
program ["Programma "Zemli i voli": Pervonachal’naia redaktsiia" (GRV:219)]

Activists in the second revolutionary situation concentrated on

Peasants. But another and soon dominant feature of this
phase came to the fore =

This [Russian] crisis is a new turning point in European history. Russia--and I have
studied conditions there from the original Russian
sources, unofficial and official (the latter accessible to but few persons, but obtained
for me through friends in Petersburg)--has long been standing on the threshold of an
upheaval; all the elements of it are prepared. The gallant Turks have hastened the
explosion by years with the thrashing they have inflicted [ID] not
merely to the Russian army and Russian finances, but to the very persons of
the dynasty commanding the army (the Tsar, the heir to the throne, and six other
Romanovs). The upheaval will begin secundum artem [according to the rules of the game], with
some playing at constitutionalism, et puis il y aura un beau tapage [and then follows the
brawl]. If Mother Nature is not particularly unfavorable towards us, we shall yet live to see the fun!

The stupid nonsense the Russian students are perpetrating is merely a symptom, worthless in itself.
[Kazan demonstration, involving future Russian Marxist leader George Plekhanov among
others] But it is a symptom. All sections of Russian society are in full decomposition
economically, morally, and intellectually.

This time the revolution begins in the East, hitherto the unbroken bulwark and reserve army of
counter-revolution [M&E, Selected Corr:374 | Itenberg,RS2:4 selective citation]

1878fa:A year after his letter to Sorge (above), Marx composed a letter to the editor of the Russian
journal Otechestvennye zapiski [Notes of the Fatherland]

In the letter Marx suggested that Russia need not traverse the same historical path that Germany
or England have followed as revolutionary workers advanced toward the better future [SLM]

Berlin Treaty nullified Russian, Bulgarian and Serbian gains from war with Turkey

With the internationally enforced nullificaton
of the Russian/Turkish bilateral San Stefano Treaty, England and Austria won
great concessions. Russia was stripped of nearly
all advantages, and Turkey was locking into its sick decline

Bulgarian independence was nullified and the nation divided

The northern half fell under indirect Ottoman authority

The southern half completely under Ottoman rule

Macedonia was taken from Bulgaria and placed under complete Ottoman suzerainty

The main push for this reversal came from England and Austria

In addition to their own fish to fry, these two powers were concerned about expansion of Russian power and
the "dangerous" rise of authentic independence in the Balkans Here are some of the details =

England took this occasion to acquire the strategically located island of
Cyprus with its large population of Orthodox Greeks and Moslem Turks

Austro-Hungarian imperial interests were connected with an ancient authority
they exercised over restless Slovenes and Croats

These were Catholic Slavs whose native language was basically the same as the
Eastern Orthodox Serbs

Slovenes and Croats write with the Latin rather than the Cyrillic alphabet since literacy came to
them in its Roman Catholic form

Austria did not want events to inspire national independence movements among these
people, but Vienna’s interests were more directly touched by developments in Bosnia-Hercegovina
=

Serbia was declared independent, but suffered two serious insults

First, Bosnia-Hercegovina was taken from Turks and Serbs, and placed under
Austrian administration and military occupation

This represented a slap in the face for both Turkey and newly independent Serbia

Austria gained great expansion of power from Russian victory, and denied any advantages to Russia

This move was the most aggressive and least defensible in an era and area that
required wise diplomacy rather than unrestrained opportunism

This move at this time and place will echo down through the 20th century

Second, Montenegro [Crna gora] declared independent (but not a part of
Serbia)

This represented an insult but also a serious threat to Serbia

Montenegro was over the centuries the mountain fastness, the last refuge, of
Serbian independence from Turkish and German power

It was also the oldest of Russian allies in the Balkans

1516:1851; Montenegro was ruled for more that three centuries by Orthodox bishop/princes [vladikas]

From 1715 Montenegro was in close alliance with Russia, recognizing the spiritual
leadership of Russian emperors over the vladikas

Romania became independent, but ceded southern Bessarabia to Russia in return for Dobruja

NB! "The West" took strong and significant stand
against national independence for Bulgarians and other South-Slavic [Yugoslavian]
peoples, so long as that independence threatened -- or failed to further --
their own imperialist aims

"The West" took an equally strong but ironic stand in support of
Ottoman imperial rule, so long as that Ottoman imperialism could be controlled by them

The Berlin Treaty, however, failed to meet significant needs in the area
and laid the foundations for European catastrophe =

Unrestrained imperialist practices were now employed within the European homeland

"Life support" applied by "The West" to the Ottoman Empire ("the sick man of Europe")
was breaking down

A Turkish nationalistic and militaristic movement
arose [ID] in the same year
that Austria seized Bosnia and Herzegovina [ID]

The dysfunctional relationships expressed in the freakish Berlin Treaty sickened European diplomacy

The near-sighted and low-content alliances that grew out of these 1878 deliberations distorted
international events from this point forward into the catastrophe of WW1. EG=

Turkish/Russian accommodation was forestalled

Austria and England teamed up against Russia and Turkey

Bulgarian/Serbian enmity was provoked

Foundations were laid for an unnatural life-death alliance of England and Russia against Germany

As WW1 approached, a large symphony of freakish diplomatic alliances
arose, unrehearsed and unstable in membership, but sectioned up for the
first time and sounding forth in the noisy concert that SAC editor has named "Imperialism Comes Home"

Under the constant distorting influence of global industrialized militaristic competition, the
events of 1878 initiated an adjustment of the post-Napoleonic "balance of powers" over the next 36 years,
up to 1914 [ID]

The "Near-East" half of AfroAsia was not the only arena of emerging world conflict that weighed in
on 1878 Berlin Treaty deliberations =

1878:Afghanistan had become a site of imperialist military clashes between Russia
and England

Each country tried to play the Great Game in this region through subordinate emirs, native Islamic rulers,
and propped-up war lords

This early act of successful political assassination was taken in revenge for what was
considered extreme and unjust state action in the execution of I.M. Koval’skii

These early acts of terror in the second revolutionary situation were frequently explicit acts of revenge

<>1878oc18:1879ja23; Petersburg | The great "Trial of the 193"
followed soon and lasted three months

The great trial was only indirectly related to recent sensational physical assaults on authority
carried out by Zasulich [ID] and Kravchinskii [ID]

This was a trial of leading figures from amng the more than 4000 activists who had been arrested
over the previous four years, almost all in connection with the "Going to the People" [ID]

Prisons overflowed. Nearly 100 died or went insane before the trial

At least 30 different actual organizations and voluntary political associations were involved

About one-fourth of the defendants were women

Defendants were represented by independent lawyers, according to the new legal reforms

The trial showed that "The Going" was an expression of widely felt impulses that realized themselves in
individual and small group actions without any central coordination

For its own purposes, the tsarist state treated this expression of national political discontent and
optimism as a single conspiracy, a single "criminal association" [prestupnoe
soobshchestvo] with the goal of "overthrowing the government" [s
tsel’iu gosudarstvennogo perevorota]

Against the towering power of the state, and the obduracy of villagers, some of the
increasingly isolated individual activists felt they had only one weapon -- terror

In his concern for the welfare of the Bulgarian people after their liberation
from the Turkish yoke [ID], the sovereign emperor
has deemed it necessary to grant this people true self-government, the
inviolability of the rights of the individual, an independent judiciary, and
freedom of the press. The zemstvo of Tver Province dares to hope that the
Russian people, who bore the entire burden of the war with such complete
readiness and with such self-sacrificing love for their tsar-emancipator, will
be allowed to enjoy the same blessings, which alone can lead them, in the words
of the sovereign, along the path of gradual, peaceful, and legal development
[VSB,3:634]

The Bulgarian constitutional initiative was a third moment in the
history of Russian political culture when constitutional reforms were
offered non-Russian peoples under
imperial power but denied to Russians themselves

Zemstvos became increasingly political as its technical functions began to take hold after a
slow 15-year startup, and especially as Zemstvo activists gained control over increasing tax revenues

Zemstvos were discovering links between their technical functions
and their political needs, a discovery characteristic of the general European
experience of political institutional modernization

<>1879:1880; Russian novelist
Fedor Dostoevsky[pix] wrote his most widely acclaimed work
Brothers Karamazov
*--Petrozavodsk State University Russian-language complete works of Dostoevsky
[W]
\\
*--Wagar on Dostoevsky [TXT]

Henry George subsequently had a startlingly successful political career, running on a reformist/progressive
platform with his infamous "single tax" at the center

He believed that the growth rate of poverty was always greater than the growth rate of wealth

This sad fact was caused, in his view, by increase over time of land rents and values

Larger social forces caused the increase, but isolated owning individuals cashed in on that increase

He felt that a single tax on land would solve the problem

Critics found much to dislike in this scheme, but the biggest force at work against George was the transformation
of economic life from agriculture to industry, the shift from the countryside to the city

1879ap02:Petersburg Winter Palace Square| A. K. Solov’ev fired 3 times at Alexander II, without hitting
him. He acted also without approval of the underground revolutionary party Land and Liberty, but with a revolver they
supplied

1879ap:Congress of constitutionalists made up of representatives of Tver, Chernigov, Moscow and
Tula Zemstvos, with reprentatives of Kharkov and Kiev Zemstvos in attendance, plus prominent
public figures and Moscow University professors, EG= Maksim Kovalevskii and V.A. Gol'tsev, Ivan Petrunkevich
and Fedor Rodichev played key roles in framing constitutional and civil libertarian positions, and in promoting
the cause of Zemstvo independence from state control [1929ja:SEER#7,20:319-20]

1879ap05:Russian Emperor Alexander II, having narrowly escaped a terrorist
attempt on his life, issued counter-reform decree strengthening the power
of governor-generals [VSB,3:665]

1879jy25:au05; Odessa "Trial of the Twenty-Eight". These 28 "revolutionists", including a
14-year old girl, V. L. Gukovskaia, held in camera because oficials no longer
trusted open trial by jury, such that acquitted Vera Zasulich [ID]

1880fe: Petr Saburov, newly appointed Russian Ambassador to Germany and in close
association with German Chancellor Bismarck, wrote a memo to Alexander II in which he defined the fundamental
objectives of Russian foreign policy = "the security of Russia's military and political position in the
Black Sea (which clashed with Britain); and the emancipation and political organization of the kindred races
in the Balkan Peninsula (clashing with Austrian interests)" [The Saburov Memoirs:124]

<>1880de11(NS): German Imperial Military Chief of Staff, Baron Helmut von Moltke,
wrote a letter to a leading German jurist in which he revealed a great deal about his militaristic ideas on the nature of war
[E-TXT].
Moltke was responding to an 1880se09 manual on "The Laws of War on Land" issued by
the Institute of International Law at Oxford [E-TXT]

<>1881:Ottoman Turkish sultan Abdul Hamid II agreed to
"Decree of Muharrem" which created joint "Council of the Public Debt", further consolidating English fiscal power
over the Turks

Russia had done well on its own in dealing with the Turks, but "The West" was not going to let that succeed

The big financial dimension of the Great Game was too much for
Russia [EG] even at the periphery of Ottoman Turkish
power directly on Russian imperial frontiers in Central-Asia

Everywhere in Europe, but most dramatically in Russia, the liberalism
that moved crowds to action over the previous century seemed no longer to fit the needs of the time
\\
*--VRR, ch.22

Spas na krovi [The Savior on the Blood]
A cathedral build in Petersburg on the spot
where Emperor Alexander II was assassinated

<>1881mr02:1894; Russian Emperor Alexander III reigned
in a time of official reactionary policy [ID] following the second revolutionary situation
and terrorist assassination of his father, Alexander II, the "tsar liberator"

1877se17:1882my06; Alexander III was much influenced by the political ideas of reactionary
Ober-prokurator of the Holy Synod, Konstantin Pobedonostsev

Pobedonostsev dispatched a steady stream of advisory memos over the critical
five-year period surrounding the assassination of Alexander II [VSB,3:671-5]

1881mr08:1882ap10; reform-minded ex-Minister of War Dmitrii Miliutin's diary
described atmosphere of crisis in governmental circles [VSB,3:679-80]

1881su:1882fa; Petersburg court insiders (government ministers, generals,
grand dukes and other high-ranking members of the royal family, statist elites close to the tsarist throne)
formed the Holy Retinue [Sviashchennaia druzhina]

This covert organization was designed to do combat with the revolutionary movement

A secret Central Committee of the Holy Retinue directed operations under the leadership of
Prince P.P. Shuvalov who commanded a widely ramified network of spies and provocateurs

These operations were independent of regular police agencies, "off the books", and they were
kept secret both from revolutionaries and the public

Operatives raided underground printing presses and worked to identify and entrap political suspects

The organization was especially active abroad. It published two newspapers
in Geneva, Vol’noe slovo [The Free Word] and Pravda [The Truth]
without revealing the organization behind the publications

Security operations, political opposition and war conflated in a time of generalized terrorism,
not just that of revolutionists but of high insiders as well

Yet it might be said that profound, possibly even "progressive", changes took place in these
years of reactionary policy, the reign of Alexander III

Over the next quarter century, the tsarist state made its contribution
both to the promotion and the suppression of impending revolution

USA opinion of Russia, and thus USA-Russian relations, deteriorated to some degree

<>1881mr08(NS):German chancellor Bismarck's
justification for the first accident insurance bill, a component of a wider program of social
welfare [CCC3,2:1007-10 | DPH:266-8]
*1884mr10:Bismarck speech on the need to promote the welfare
of wage-laborers [PWT2:192-4]

Aksakov said panslavism was not a "political party" but insisted that the Russian state could
not renounce a panslav mission "that can bring existence, life, and freedom to
the Slavic peoples and to the entire Orthodox-Slavic world"

That would force Russia to renounce "her very self, her very essence, and her mission among
mankind"

Aksakov was disturbed that Germans regarded any Russian nationalism in literature or politics as
panslavic and therefore odious =

We repeat: there exists neither a political panslavic program nor a political
panslavic ideal. But as the spiritual solidarity and the gravitation of various branches of
the same race toward each other, as the awareness of Slavic
brotherhood, as an Orthodox-Slavic worldheaded by Russia
[emphasis added] and asserting its claim to exist, live, and develop side by
side with the Roman [Romance-language cultures = France, Italy, Spain, etc.] and
Germanic [including England] worlds, panslavism exists both as an idea and as a
fact.

<>1881au14:Russian statute sought to strengthen law and
order [VSB,3:680-1]
*--The tsarist state sought to reaffirm what it took to be the fundamental truths
of Russian politics
*--These truths were increasingly embodied in reactionary policy, but occasionally
in certain reform measures

<>1882:Switzerland | Friedrich Engels
published Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, a summary of Marxism published in the last year of Marx's
life [CCC3,2:701-24 | CCS:775-801 | CCS,2:265-291]

Engels' summary was a simplification, and its claim to be "scientific"
might be questionable to some

But it eventually achieved a popularity as wide as The Communist Manifesto, the publication which
opened the public careers of Marx and Engels in 1847-1848

In comparison with Marx's condensed and high-impact "A Preface to A Contribution..."
(1859), Engels' summary, is an explanation of what "Marxism" was all about.
It was more detailed and self-explanatory

1882ja:Marx and Engels composed a preface to the 2nd Russian edition of
the Communist Manifesto. The preface concluded =

If the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that both
complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land [the
peasant obshchina] may serve as the starting-point for a communist devlopment

Nietzsche's Death Mask
Which calls to mind the finest-ever graffito that I personally saw =
*1965su:On the entrance to the NYC subway at the main gate of Columbia University, someone had written =
"God is dead -- Nietzsche"
Just below this, someone else wrote =
"Nietzsche is dead -- God"

Vera Zasulich, the famous one-act "terrorist" [ID], was an active member of Plekhanov's
émigré group where she became again famous for a "one-act" ideological moment (letter to Karl
Marx [ID])
\\
*1980:JHI#40,1:89f| Henry Eaton, "Marx and the Russians" [TXT]

<>1884my:Paris | Sarah
Bernhardt (1844-1923) thrilled audiences with her popular portrayal of Lady Macbeth in a stunning French
translation of the Shakespeare tragedy

"The Divine Sarah" might be thought of as the first great popular entertainment
"celebrity" [TXT], the pioneer of commercial-culture pop-arts

<>1884au23:Russian University statute
[VSB,3:682-4] reversed reformist gains in the 1863 University statute [ID]
*--By placing new restrictions on university life, the tsarist state
pursued a recognizable reactionary policy goal to reserve "careers open to talent"
only for presumed old regime elites rather than for an increasingly dynamic Russian population at large

<>1884fa:Korean court struggles
roused Japanese and Chinese appetites and caused tensions [Beasley,MHJ:161]
*--Paul George von Molendorff, a high-ranking German administrator or "adviser" within the Korean government,
tried to draw Russia into conflict [KEJ,6:341]
*--Manchuria was also becoming a prize in this global imperialist conflict
\\
*--George Alexander Lensen, Balance of intrigue: international rivalry in Korea and Manchuria, 1884-1899 (1982)

Americans, he preached, are a "race of unequaled energy, with all the majesty of numbers and the might of wealth
behind itthe representation, let us hope, of the largest liberty, the purest Christianity, the highest civilization"

The preacher noted with approval USAs development of "peculiarly aggressive traits calculated to
impress its institutions upon mankind" [46-47]

He predicted that USA will "spread itself across the earth". He added, "Can any one doubt that this
race, unless devitalized by alcohol and tobacco, is destined to dispossess many weaker races, assimilate
others, and mold the remainder, until, in a very true and important sense, it has Anglo-Saxonized mankind?"

1896:Royal Dutch manager Kessler hired young banker and accountant Henri Deterding who
was to launch that company on its global career

1896:Samuel finagled a Dutch concession on Borneo, where he struck oil and then built
refinery in Balik Papan

1897:Borneo oil business so extensive that Samuel formed a separate "Shell" Trading and Transport Company

1898:England knighted Marcus Samuel for services to the Empire = Shell ship freed a Navy warship
that ran aground in the Suez Canal

1899:Samuel first formally tried to persuade the Navy to test oil as a fuel, the fuel his own fleet used

Samuel pioneered the use of oil as marine fuel and tried to get the Navy to convert to oil

So it happened, but Samuel was not allowed by the British establishment to play the central role

1900:Dutch East Indies production encouraged Samuel to renew contract with the Rothschilds
to purchase Russian petroleum products for overseas transport and marketing

Shell expanded everywhere and determined to market gasoline in Europe by purchasing
a German company from the Deutsche Bank

Shell now intended to enter into active competition with the companies that controlled the market
there = Standard, Nobel and Rothschild

1901fa:Shell was Britain's largest oil company, second only to Standard
worldwide. As it prepared to enter the European market, it was the only company
with global sources of crude

Certain industrial companies were by definition "transnational" and began to
act their spheres of influence like sovereign nation-states, at first like small sovereign states and
then later like largish ones

The stage was set for a titanic struggle between Standard and Shell. Nobels of Russia fell by
the wayside. The contemporary struggle for world dominance in the new and every-day more
imperative petroleum age was well under way

<>1885fe26(NS):Berlin Conference agreed on General Act
whereby European imperialist powers settled on a division of Africa among them

Bismarck offered himself as the "honest broker", but
he was a less-than-neutral host, seeking advantages for Germany as the western European states
sliced the cake of Africa and took possession of their respective assigned pieces

Clearly the slicing was well under way before the Berlin Conference

1877:Englishman Cecil Rhodes,
on the eve of a great career of personal aggrandizement and imperialistic adventure in
African diamond extraction, jotted down his most heartfelt views on the need to prepare
an organization to consolidate and expand English imperialist control [TXT]

Rhodes dreamt of an international shadow state designed to repair historical damage to the global British Empire

EG= Repossess USA, earlier lost in the colonial revolution

Expand English control over Africa, etc., where other European states were competing with England

Protect English imperialist dominion everywhere

Rhodes envisioned a vast, world-wide secret society, a colonial/imperialist version of the Jesuit order or Free Masons
[Wki]

Rhodes' company, De Beers Consolidated Mines, controlled 90% of the world's diamond production
and had a huge stake in south African gold mining

1882:England claimed all of Egypt, having already taken possession of the Suez Canal

These
English moves in AfroAsia
weakened the English position in Istanbul and persauded Sultan Hamid to shift
away from England and toward Germany

1883jy06:Hamburg Chamber of Commerce laid out its views on German interests in West Africa
[BNE:171-4]

Before long German economic advisers began to supplant the English

1884:1896; Istanbul| German Field Marshall Colmar Freiherr von der Goltz
[ID] served as Hamid's military adviser.
He was soon awarded the Turkish title pasha and eventually was designated an Ottoman Imperial mushir (field-marshal)

The Berlin Conference now moved to build on these beginnings and bring
them under some sort of international diplomatic managment

The Conference made multiple cuts through areas and populations of Africa, dividing large
chunks of the continent among European colonial powers, usually with no serious regard for
existing territorial regions of native African peoples

A most remarkable act of the Conference = The King of Belgium, Leopold, received as personal property the extensive lands drained by
the Congo River

1892se16:English Foreign Secretary justified taking Uganda as an English
imperialist possession on the basis of the need to protect English control
over Egypt and the Suez Canal

1908:English Lord Cromer justified the taking of Egypt in much the same way
[E-TXT]

The Berlin Conference made "The West" temporarily happy, if not the Africans or those Europeans
excluded from the Conference =

While England presumed the right a few years earlier [ID]
to become intimately involved in Russian affairs after the Russo-Turkish war, it now joined other ambitious
central and west European states in the exclusion of Russia from the Berlin Conference and its fateful
deliberations

Africa was in the grips of the imperialist powers of north-west Europe

The Great Game was not child's play, and the story of it is not
a soothing lullaby

<>1886:Russian musician Vasilii Andreev
began to appear in public with his popular balalaika orchestra [ID]
*--Pop-arts were often linked with nostalgia for the pre-industrial
or "folk" world
*--Also with an awakening of a broad public interest in art that treated simple every-day life ubiquities

<>1886my04:USA Chicago,
Haymarket Square the site of violent labor disorder

Police moved to break up a large crowd of demonstrators gathered in support of the eight-hour
working day

In the midst of the assembly, a bomb detonated, killing seven policemen and four others

Tönnies contrasted artificial modern Society with an idealized recollection of
pre-industrial everyday life in the rural Community

Tönnies influenced a significant growth of a public reactionary mood in
Europe (the desire to return to a mythic past, a past not in fact ever experienced)

Where his influence did not reach we find other thinkers headed down the same
path. EG=Russian pundit Ivan Aksakov's contrast between publika [the public]
and narod [the people, the folk], a close parallel with Tönnies' Society and Community

Disenchantment with the modernizing contemporary world was shared by many who,
unlike Tönnies and Aksakov, had no personal experience with life "down on the farm"

1887:USA author Edward Bellamy expressed a very different view when
he published Looking Backward: 2000-1887[TXT]

This bit of "science fiction" was intended to promote progressive values by
refuting the claim often made by elite establishmentarians of the time --
1887 -- that contemporary everyday life approached perfection [ID]

So far Bellamy seemed in line with the views of Tönnies or Aksakov, but he
was in fact headed in the opposite direction =

He contrasted what he took to be the sorrowful truths of his contemporary 1887 with the good life in an imagined
future year 2000

Looking Backward offered a complex variation on
the "utopian" tradition

If Tönnies can be called "reactionary" (as he was above), Bellamy can be called "radical"
in the sense that he recommended movement forward toward an idealized
industrialized, scientific and technological future, hitherto not
actually experienced by anyone

Some American social critics, reacting in part to Bellamy, expressed their version
of the growing general-European unease with conditions of everyday life caused
by industrial modernization [Further aspects of Russian/USA "shared history" reveal
themselves = TXT ]

<>1887:USA reading public
was captivated by Leo Tolstoy or, more accurately, "Tolstoyanism", which exploded
into a virtual "Tolstoy craze"

In his late years, the great Russian novelist was becoming a moral force
throughout the world

Tolstoy's broad appeal and his turn toward popular preachment linked the high art of his novels with the
emerging era of pop-arts [TXT]

"The Kingdom of God is Within You" (1893) and 1894:"Christianity and
Patriotism" [VSB,3:733]

<>1887mr01: Here on the sixth anniversary of Alexander II's
assassination, Aleksandr Ulianov (Lenin's older brother) was arrested with others who were planning
the assassination of the dead tsar's son and heir, Alexander III
*--Terrorism had slackened, but had not disappeared from Russian political culture
\\
*--Philip Pomper, Lenin's Brother

1895:1898; Russian Imperial State Bank became the central bank of issue in the Empire

This came after Witte brought an end to the paper ruble (with negligible foreign exchange value)
and introduced the gold standard (with an exchangeability equal to that of any European currency)

Witte gave Russia for the first time an internationally recognized monetary system

Foreign investment was encouraged, but always with an eye to restricting "repatriation" (profits
on foreign investment transfered to the home country, IE= draining profits out of Russia)

Tariffs on certain imports were introduced to protect the young and vulnerable Russian industrial
economy from other more "advanced" economies

In this connection Witte was opposed to open markets and pure laissez faire measures

Like so many world statesmen who addressed the problems of economic modernization in the face of the intrusive or
imperialistic advanced economies of "The West", Witte was influenced by the economic ideas
of Friedrich List

Witte's economic policy was but a program to meet the current need and showed
that simplicity of conception which was his distinctive trait. This policy was,
in brief, the accumulation of funds in the state treasury and the accumulation
of private capital in the country. Realizing that the best method of increasing
state resources was to develop the country's economic life, he encouraged such
development; but he considered that the only means to attain this end was to
develop industry, heavy industry especially, since it was the source of all
great private fortunes. . . . Witte held that agriculture is but a limited field
for the application of human labor, while industry, unconfined by material
limitations, may develop indefinitely and thereby use an indefinite amount of
labor. Agriculture to him was a necessary but purely subordinate branch of
public economy; agriculture was necessary to feed the population, but could not
serve as the sole source of its well-being. This explains his negative attitude
toward all measures designed to improve the agricultural situation. [?EG?] As to
selection of method, Witte was . . . an opportunist; he was facile also in
shifting his opinion when he considered such shifts advisable. But his aim of
promoting the economic development of Russia as a basis for political strength
was steady and unswerving. In summary, Witte's accomplishments as Minister of
Finance reveal his great merit as an organizer of our state economy. He brought
order into the state budget, avoided deficits, and achieved even a pronounced
increase of revenues; he strengthened Russian finances as much by the
introduction of the gold standard as by his successful conversion of state loans
to a lower rate of interest, to four instead of six per cent. He extended the
network of our railways; he introduced and developed university and secondary
technical education; he assembled a fine group of assistants and other officers
in the Ministry of Finance; he organized the department of tax supervision; he
most successfully introduced and organized the large-scale liquor monopoly. All
these were the fruits of Witte's strenuous labor. Thanks to him our industry
began to develop at an almost incredible speed and attracted a part of the
population away from agricultural pursuits which could not absorb all the
peasant labor as the population increased.

As he pursued a legal and political career in NY, he was able to purchase ranch lands in Dakota territory
where Native American Lakota Sioux were being pushed off their lands and pressed into reservations

After a political setback and devastating personal loss of close family members, he retired for
two years (1884-1886) to his ranches

His book reflected his experience on the range and his desire to be identified with the mythic vigor of
pioneer life

He praised the supreme "righteousness" of war against indigenous "savages" of the prairie, "though it is
apt to be also the most terrible and inhuman"

Wide-eyed acknowledgment of this gruesome reality lies at the heart of his "heroism"

He wrote further, "American and Indian, Boer and Zulu,
Cossack and Tatar, New Zealander and Maori, -- in each case the victor, horrible though many of his
deeds are, has laid deep the foundations for the future greatness of a mighty people"

NB! his future-forward view that horror today might eventually be justified by a great tomorrow

"Though unsuccessful as a rancher", as one popular US desk encyclopedia put it, "he gained in
the West many of the picturesque mannerisms that complimented his positive personality"

<>1889ja01:USA NV Paiute native, Wovoka, fell into a
trance and had visions that became the basis of a new mystery religion called the
"Ghost Dance"
*--Within a year, the Native American reservations on the Great Plains were alive with Ghost Dancers

<>1889je:USA journal North American Review
published article "The Gospel of Wealth" [TXT
| Excerpts = CCC2,2:803f CCC3,2:885-99], written by
industrialist Andrew Carnegie

He understood that it met no authentic aristocratic need and that it did harm to the most
numerous soslovie, the peasantry

In his memoirs, Witte described how those officials who created Land Captains
presumed that villagers were "eternally under age, so to speak. This belief seems to me profoundly erroneous"

Witte prophetically predicted that this belief "is fraught with disastrous consequences for the future"

Not only were gentry politics, per se, increasingly a failure, the Russian nobility, as a legally-defined and defended social formation [soslovie],
was not actually prospering in the countryside. On the whole, rural gentry were weak and poor, and thus generally dispirited

EG= View these film dramatizations = FLM#1 based on Turgenev story |
FLM#2 based on a Chekhov story

But for some gentry, life was still sweet, or at least had the external trappings of sweetness =

1894:Cadets prepare to practice dancing at the exclusive Corps of
Pages [pix]

<>1889:Paris World's Exposition on the centennial of
the Great French Revolution was less focused on "liberty, equality and fraternity" than on the muscular
accomplishments of economic progress
*--This world's fair followed in the emerging tradition [ID] by
featured the newly built steely symbol of French industrial modernization, the Eiffel Tower
[W lxt]
*--Painting of the entrance into the Central Dome of the Gallery of Machines
[lxt]
*--This was the "Beautiful Era" [Belle Époque] that immediately preceded the WW1 catastrophe
\\
*--Wki

<>1889jy14:jy20; Paris | In the year of the
Paris Exposition [just above], an equally global or universal-minded organization, the Second International, held
its founding congress

The First International had faded from the scene in acrimoneous factional
dispute among leading figures [LOOP]

But now European (and soon world-wide) social-democracy was becoming a public force

From this time forward for over a quarter century, the Second International worked to mobilize European, North
American and world-wide progressive political parties and workers' unions

The goal was to hasten labor-friendly economic reform and to limit the economic power of capitalism
and the political power of industrial companies

Activists felt that the liberal or "bourgeois" revolution had in fact created a new hierarchy based on wealth

That hierarchy was depicted in a pamphlet published by the International Workers
of the World [pix]

The long-term goal of the Second International was to replace the capitalist
or bourgeois "mode of production" with a radically democratic socialist mode of production
in which wage-laborers assumed the roles of both management and labor

However, European socialism was splitting, giving birth to two main trends in Social Democracy =

The size and strength of the Second International did pressure industrializing
nations of Europe and North America to follow Bismarcks lead
in Germany in the direction of social welfare reform
\\
*--Rimlinger's comparative history of welfare, ch. 1:1-10 (Intro)
[TXT]; chs. 6-7:193-301 (USA [TXT]
and Russia [TXT]); ch. 9:333-43 (Conclusion)*--P. Flora and A. J. Heidenheimer,
eds., Development of Welfare States
in America and Europe
*--GO 1927 to see how welfare comparison looked four decades later in a time of
crisis, between WW1 & WW2
*--GO 1964 to see how welfare comparison was done yet four
more decades later, in the era of the Cold War
*--GO 2007 to see a TABLE that compares affluence in USA with
affluence in welfare-oriented Norway
||
*--LOOP on The Second International
*--LOOP on WW1a

<>1889se:USA, Chicago | From an 1892 speech by founder
Jane Addams, Hull House was described in the following way=

It represented no association, but was opened by two women, backed by many friends, in the
belief that the mere foothold of a house, easily accessible, ample in space, hospitable and tolerant in spirit,
situated in the midst of the large foreign colonies which so easily isolate themselves in American cities, would
be in itself a serviceable thing for Chicago. Hull House endeavors to make social
intercourse express the growing sense of the economic unity of society. It is an effort to add the social function
to democracy [boldface added to highlight sense of "civil society" [ID] embedding
in Addams' comments]. It was opened on the theory that the dependence of classes on eachother is reciprocal;
and that as "the social relation is essentially a reciprocal relation, it gave a form of expression that has
peculiar value" ["The Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements" (TXT)]

Colonial policy is the child of the industrial revolution. For wealthy countries where capital
abounds and accumulates fast, where industry is expanding steadily, where even agriculture
must become mechanized in order to survive, exports are essential for public prosperity. Both
demand for labor and scope for capital investment depend on the foreign market ... All over the
world, beyond the Vosges, and across the Atlantic, the raising of high tariffs has resulted in an
increasing volume of manufactured goods, the disappearance of traditional markets, and the
appearance of fierce competition. Countries react by raising their own tariff barriers, but that is
not enough [...] The protectionist system, unless accompanied by a serious colonial policy, is like
a steam engine without a safety valve [...] The European consumer market is saturated; unless we
declare modern society bankrupt and prepare, at the dawn of the twentieth century, for its
liquidation by revolution (the consequences of which we can scarcely foresee), new consumer
markets will have to be created in other parts of the world. [...] Colonial policy is an international
manifestation of the eternal laws of competition [Heineman, Readings in European History:184]

*1870s:Ferry held liberal views on democratic education
[CCC2,2:512-21 | CCC3,2:1030-]
*1884mr28:French Chamber of Deputies heard Ferry speech on the need for French imperial
expansion [E-TXT]
*1885jy28:The Chamber heard Ferry on the question of French interests in Madagascar
[BNE:174-9]
\\
*--LOOP on WW1a

In this year the world-famous chemist Dmitrii Mendeleev resigned his
St.Petersburg University post in protest over the refusal of Minister
of Education I. D. Delianov (an acolyte of Dmitrii Tolstoi) to accept a student petition
which Mendeleev had agreed to deliver

<>1890jy02:USA passed Sherman
Anti-Trust Act
[Wki]
*--The Act was originally intended for use against large corporations and other business
conglomerates [ID]
engaged in the unchecked pursuit of their own perceived interests
*--But the Act was more frequently and effectively employed against wage-laborers who
sought to organize themselves in the pursuit of their own perceived interests
*--NB! these words on the question of "trust" in market-economic transactions
[*2009:E-TXT]

<>1890de15:SD Standing Rock Reservation,
not far from his family cabin, Sitting Bull was killed by US Government Agency
forces in connection with the policy of forceful suppression of native religious practice

<>1891:English artist, craftsman and writer
William Morris published his novel in the "utopian"
tradition, News from Nowhere, or , An Epoch of Rest [TXT]

Morris described a humane ideal future in 22nd-century England, where the observation of communitarian and
libertarian principles eradicated cultural, political, social and economic exploitation

Morris refused to accept the rampant vulgarities of mass-production industrial urbanization and commercial
culture or pop-arts

He was steeped in an esthetic of rural virtue that harmonized with a European cultural nostalgia for
a "down-on-the-farm" life-style

<>1891:1892; Russian famine
*--Not long before, Finance Minister Ivan Vyshnegradskii foolishly stated, "We may starve, but
we WILL export". Who did he mean by "we"?
*--Also not long before, the reactionary state took steps to confine Zemstvo
operations [EG], severely limiting the ability of Russia to deal with famine
*--Nizhnii-Novgorod region| Pioneer Russian news-photographer Maksim Petrovich Dmitriev recorded
village and urban life in this difficult time
[pix#1
(opening pix is of a mirskoi skhod [village assembly) | pix#2].
News photos presented the suffering of the peasantry as only quality
photographic realism can, immediate and horribly beautiful =

Russia now poised to become vigorous Pacific Rim presence, but would it be a commercial or a
military/imperialist presence?

Or would it be cultural/spiritual? Consider future Trans-Siberian railroad
administrator and Chairman of the Russo-Chinese Bank, Prince Esper Ukhtomskii
[Wki-ID |
Excerpts from his account of travel "To the East" as companion of tsarevich Nicholas Aleksandrovich
(E-TXT)]

<>1891my01:Russian industrial workers delivered
and listened to speeches on May Day [Harding:84-91]
*1891fe04:French Labor Party and the National Federation of Trade Unions urged French workers to join the
international labor day of protest (May Day) against miserable conditions
of wage-laborers [BNE:146-7] GO my15

<>1891my11:Japan, Otsu | Terrorist Tsuda Sanzo, an escort policeman, slightly
wounded future Russian Emperor Nicholas II during state visit
*--Kojima Iken, Supreme court, ruled against the death penalty, showing unusual independence of the law and its courts, but
also diplomatic slight to Russia
\\
*--KEJ

<>1891oc:German Social-Democratic Party adopted its Erfurt Program
[DPH:274-7]
*--German miner Nikolaus Osterroth wrote later memoirs about his first confrontation with the Social Democratic
Party [PWT2:170-3]

Russian Empire, 1895-1910. Pictures of St.Petersburg. Photographs from stereoscopic negatives in
the Keystone-Mast Collection. They are presented by California Museum of Photography, University of
California, Riverside (comments: edward.earle@ucr.edu)

<>1892jy04:USA | Platform of the Progressive or Populist
Party addressed central issue of economic inequality and criticized the growing role of government in fostering and
protecting that inequality

Much rhetorical energy was exerted to praise laissez faire and "free" markets

But there was by this time little authentic dispute among US political factions, left, right or center, about
whether a vigorous government should or should not be involved in social and economic matters

In practice (if not in rhetoric) all factions agreed that government should play an active role in the economy

The only real issue was this = Whose social and economic interests ought to be fostered
and protected by vigorous government action

The new Progressive Party opposed use of governmental power to support privilege

It sought to break up the close alliance of government and wealth

It did not seek to curb governmental power, rather to shift the focus of governmental power from protection
of industrial companies toward protection of the needs of the vast majority of working people, to convert government
into an active agent of popular welfare

Among their goals was the institution of a graduated income tax, introduction of initiative and referendum,
and democratic election of senators

At the same time, the Progressive or Populist Party, as a "third party", challenged the near
monopoly on political power held by the two main political parties

The Progressive Era in USA gave Russian scholar Moisei Ostrogorskii [ID]
grounds for optimism about the general European future of democratic politics

Occurring within two days of one another, the formation of the Progressive Party and the Homestead Strike
announced that the Progressive Era was going to be a highly fretted quarter century in US history

\\
*--James Howard Bridge, The Inside History of the Carnegie Steel Company: The Romance of Millions (1903)
*--Paul Krause, The Battle for Homestead: Politics, Culture and Steel

Russian artistic developments are best understood in a pan-European, perhaps one should say "global", context
\\
*--William Brumfield, The Origins of Modernism in Russian Architecture
*--Robert C. Williams, Russian Art and American Money, 1900-1940

<>1893:English theorist Thomas Huxley
published Evolution and Ethics
[excerpts = CCC3,2:855-66] which encouraged application of Darwinian biology
to the analysis of human morality and behavior

The march of "Western" scientism was resisted in "The West", but not with a view to turning back to old spiritual
ways =

The new journal stated that "it is necessary to act against the miserable positivism, which we
are departing from, and the irritating religiosity, which we risk getting stuck in, to
build a philosophy of action and reflection, to be rationalists with a passion"

Halévy at this time devoted serious attention to the English classical liberal economic thinkers,
the philosophical radicals of the early 19th century [ID] =

In a year of economic crisis in USA, Chicago put on the best show possible

George Ferris, Jr., constructed the first modern Ferris wheel, powered by a 1000 horse power engine

Thirty-six wooden cars were suspended around the 264 feet high wheel. Each car held 60 riders

More than one million paid fifty cents for a ride

At this same fair, Wisconsin University [old "Northwest Territory"] Professor
Frederick Jackson Turner pronounced his great theory about US history, "The
Significance of the Frontier in American History" [TXT]

<>1893de14:Russian law restricted peasant ability to
buy or sell land independently from village community [VSB,3:756]
*--Reactionary policy resisted evolution of independent peasant farmers just as the
Siberian frontier opened for them
*1893:English traveler F. J. Wishaw, Out of Doors in Tsarland described peasant village
life [WRH3:426-34]
*1894:Konstantin Korovin painting of wintry scene, a sleigh in front of peasant hut,
in Olga's Gallery

One of Howells' characters described the main change in American life, 1850-1890 =

In 1850, a person who ran into difficulties, who did not at first succeed, turned his hand to something else

As a last resort, a person "went West, pre-empted a quarter section of public land, and grew up with the country"

But, as the theorist/historian Turner declared, the frontier was now closed [ID]

"The struggle for life", Howells wrote, "has changed from a free fight to an encounter of disciplined forces,
and the free fighters that are left get ground to pieces between organized labor and organized capital".
[Kazin:17]

Heavy stripes of disenchantment ran through cultural life, not excluding the fine arts

Events seemed to contradict the naive "liberal" belief in progress

A feeling of disenchantment drove Max Weber into deeper theoretical
and sociological searches for sources of current problems

For others it encouraged a romantic affirmation of earlier, simpler, often rural virtues. For example, Thorstein
Veblen praised life "down on the farm" and contrasted it with urban and industrial dehumanization

Some concluded that the era of urban-based "bourgeois" liberalism was over
because the laissez faire, entrepreneurial and true free-market foundations for its existence were transformed to meet the
needs of transnational finance and corporate industrial giganticism

These might have been a latter-day USA example of that general trend labeled "Westernizer" when it appeared
a half century earlier in Russian cultural debate [ID]

Howells, for example, was much influenced by Tolstoy and the more clearly "Western"
Ivan Turgenev

However, American-born but Europe-centered author Henry James, an important
representative of the US "Westernizer" trend and a friend of Turgenev,
expressed his fear that old Europe was stagnant. Its future "is more likely to be one of disintegration, with Russia
for the eccentric on one side and America on the other" [Kazin:17]

Van Wyck Brooks showed a deep affinity for the traditions of the Russian
intelligentsia [TXT]

Powerful nations on eastern and western borders of Germany were taking action to protect themselves
from "The Triple Alliance"[ID]

<>1894ja22;1897mr31; English Parliamentarian Joseph
Chamberlain delivered three rousing imperialist and racist speeches, The British Empire:
Colonial Commerce ... [P20:23 | PWT2:213-15]
English version of European imperialism

1906:1917; The Russian State Duma was created in the institutional place of the old
absolute and autocratic tsarist authority [GO]

But the autocrat remained and the new representative or "parliamentary" governing
institution was slow to put down roots

The most significant legislative initiative taken in the time of the Duma was under the leadership of
Prime Minister Petr Stolypin[GO]

In the midst of disastrous World War One[GO], when
confronted with the 1917 February Revolution[GO], the
Duma and all its initiatives collapsed with tsarist authority = Emperor Nicholas II resigned the Russian
throne and the Duma dissolved itself [GO]
\\
*2010no29:RSH#20,1:5-63|>Pirumova,NM| "The
Elected Members of Zemstvo Assemblies and the 'Third Element' "
*1890:1905; Tver Province Zemstvo politics in the 15 years leading up to the Revolution of 1905 are
characterized by Charles Timberlake in Emerging
Democracy..., pp. 30-59

<>1895ja17:ja19; Tver liberals addressed new tsar Nicholas II about need for
representative government, and Nicholas replied with rebuke of their "senseless
dreams" about a constitution in Russia [*1934ja:SEER#12,35:349-50 & 352-4]
*--To the dismay a a large segment of the Russian educated population, Nicholas
seemed to be saying that reactionary policy would
continue as before

With its fixation on modern technological, industrial life, pop-arts
science fiction seemed always to be asking of science and technology, "Is you is, or is you ain’t my baby?"
Here are some of the most widely read Wells publications =
*1895:The Time Machine
*1896:The Island of Doctor Moreau
*1897:The Invisible Man
*1898:The War of the Worlds
*1908:The War in the Air

For Taylor, the essence of the matter was the need for closer and more detailed structuring of worker
behavior, near mechanical and scientifically scrupulous managerial attention to
every productive movement of workers and machines. Economic efficiency was the
ultimate virtue, whether in connection with machines or humans

This was a "partial solution" not so much of the workers' own "labor problem"
as it was of the capitalist managers' labor problem

Taylor's inauspicious presentation marked the beginning of a globally significant "managerial revolution"
which was redefining the functional meaning of "ownership" and old-fashioned notions of capitalist property, as well as
the increasingly mechanized image of labor in the productive process

Taylor was a child of the petroleum phase of the industrial revolution

His insights had especially important implications as the European
industrial revolution expanded fully into its gigantic, corporate phase

His importance lies in his adumbration of the coming "Second Industrial Revolution", the
petroleum phase [ID] mounting toward the managerial phase [ID]
of economic modernization =

Managerial executives were replacing entrepreneurial owners at the levers of economic
enterprise

A relatively small number of gigantic corporations -- DuPont, Westinghouse, Dunlop,
Armstrong-Whitworth, Farben, Siemens, etc. -- were beginning to function
in the world like nation-states unto themselves, struggling to be winners in the
quest to organize the earth

This was not so much a process of "Darwinian" survival of the fittest in some natural competitive process

This was an exercise in rational economic planning rather than "natural selection"

The "hand" was not "invisible" [ID], even if it was
kept out of public view

Chandler argued that mass production expanded levels of productivity to such heights that by
merging plants, bringing unit costs down, "economies of scale" were possible

Corporate organizational and distributive power gave them further close control over the process

Petroleum refiners gained control over oil wells "upstream on the
pipeline" and also filling stations "downstream on the pipeline"

Thus they positioned themselves profitably up and down the full spectrum
of production and distribution of oil, gasoline
and other petroleum products, all increasingly critical industrial commodities

This required meticulous or micro-control of humongous investment and income related to
colossal industrial enterprises

This required extremely disciplined and ornate organizational structures, yet structures
always open to intervention and control from a central administrative point

In the age of imperialist competition, scientific management also marked the opening of the European, North American and,
eventually, world-wide "managerial revolution", the 20th-century
political history of the "European Revolution" [ID],
now globalized

Russia, France and Germany considered Japanese gains to be excessive, so they launched
a tripartite intervention. [Beasley, MHJ:163 has strange list of motives, including German
desire "to edge Russia away from European politics", perhaps to render Russia
vulnerable with its back turned to Germany]

German Kaiser Wilhelm corresponded with Nicholas II over the next weeks urging Russia eastward, "to
cultivate the Asian Continent and to defend Europe from the inroads of the Great Yellow
Race" [VSB,3:693]

Russian-Japanese relations, up to this point, had been businesslike, now
relations w/Asia embittered by the tripartite intervention, especially as both Russia and Japan turned their
eyes on Korea and Manchuria

<>1896:Russian Procurator of the Holy
Synod [ID] Konstantin Pobedonostsev, Reflections of a Russian Statesman
[TXT] gave expression to the most extreme official reactionary views on modernization
of Russian life [CF= VSB,3:736-9 | WRH3:434-46 |
RRC2,2:390-401]

To what degree did these official reactionary views reflect views among the public, or beyond
the urban public and out into the countryside?

Does Pobedonostsev represent an "official reactionary world view" or does he represent
a "public reactionary world view", or more broadly a "Russian reactionary world view"?

Were his extreme views the expression of a hot-house statism or the expression
of a wide-spread national outlook? Were they the views of ordained Russian Orthodox Church functionaries?

Are his views essentially different from those of prominent Oregon public
figures in the same late-nineteenth century epoch? Consider this historical
evaluation by Russell Sadler [TXT] which appeared
in 2006mr29:ERG

Concentrated in this one person, Pobedonostsev, Russian secularization presented
itself in both of its two most significant forms =

World view. Pobedonostsev exercised his zealous power against what he
perceived to be the diabolical threat of modern intellectual secularization

Secularization, a central component of "modernization" or "Westernization" over the previous
half-millennium, continued to pose profound difficulties everywhere it was experienced around this
wide globe, in "The West" or in the north, south and east, in Christian, Islamic, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindi
and all other faith-based communities in the grip of seemingly inevitable modernization
\\
*--Mironov,1:425-518 deals with the secularization of Russian urban and rural
consciousness in the imperial period
*--Robert F. Byrnes, Pobedonostsev:
His Life and Thought (1968)
*--Vera Shevzov, Russian Orthodoxy on
the Eve of Revolution (2004) explores tension in Russia between the Church as bureau of central
government (the Petrine Church [ID]) or the Church
as a "grass-roots" expression of Russian spirituality, a place not so much for official
doctrine as for popular religious and communitarian ceremony, as seen
by Khomiakov and other Slavophiles [ID]

<>1896mr01:Ancient
AfroAsian nation Ethiopia defeated aggressive
and reckless imperialist Italy
*--A shocking moment in which a non-European peoples defeated a "Western" aggressor
*--Ethiopia was the only African nation to defeat an invading European colonial power in the
age of modern imperialism [W]

<>1896ap19:Saint Petersburg League for the Struggle to
Emancipate the Working Class, secretly organized by Russian Marxists in the previous
year, issued a proclamation [VSB,3:709]
*--The Russian Social Democratic Workers Party [SDs] was coming into existence, and in these months,
future SDs were active in labor strikes [Harding:121-208]

<>1896je09:Japan and Russia signed
Yamagata-Lobanov
Agreement, apparently guaranteeing Korean independence
*--Russian-Japanese relations seemed deceptively harmonious as they jockeyed with one
another to cash in on China's weakness and to gain advantage in
Manchuria, Korea, Sakhalin Island and the southern Kuril Islands
\\
*--LOOP on WW1a

<>1896jy09:Chicago, at the
Democratic Party's National Convention | William Jennings Bryan delivered his stirring oration
against what he thought was an urban elitist assault on rural
America, "Cross of Gold" [TXT]
*1896:USAChicago | Russian
visitor Vladimir Korolenko recorded his impressions of wage-labor
conditions in a US "Factory of Death" [Hasty:83-94]
*--Vladimir Korolenko, History of My Contemporary (memoirs
of his upbringing and youthful populist radicalism up to 1885, concentrating on the years of Siberian exile)
\\
*1918:In the last year of her life, the Polish-born German Social
Democrat Rosa Luxemburg wrote an appreciative review article
devoted to the German translation of Korolenko's
autobiography [E-TXT]

<>1896jy31:London | French and German
ambassadors to England met for long and serious (though informal) conversation about how their
two nations might be marginalized by recent global developments

The two ambassadors feared that Europe was in danger if strong and innovative measures were not taken

They were not thinking only of the old imperialist monster England

They noted also the recent rise of two new giants, Russia and USA
in Japan and China [BNE:195-8]

Russian and USA imperialism seemed to flourish, but serious conflicts among other
European imperialists threatened disastrous war =

<>1896au26:Ottoman Bank in Istanbul seized by
squad of Armenian separatists, a remarkable act of urban guerilla
warfare [W]
*--NB! The Ottoman Empire's central bank was run by an English diplomat (an auxiliary feature of the
financial imperialism, the "capitulations" that served
English interests so well, especially right there holding the keys to the vaults of "The Sick Man of Europe")

Lodge was imperialist in one direction (overseas) and isolationist in another
("the homeland"), free-trader in one direction and protectionist in another, so
long as advantage flowed in a direction beneficial to his cohort

Pressures for a new US imperialism were mounting, but it
had to cloak itself in anti-imperialist rhetoric

1897:Cartoon showed Uncle Sam "patient" as he waited for his colonies to come fully ripe
before picking [pix]

Uncle Sam is dressed in the mode of a tropical plantationist, and his basket already
holds Louisiana [ID], Texas [ID],
California [ID], and Alaska [ID]

On the branch above his head hangs Cuba, soon ripe for the picking

Notice that the large fruit tree is rooted behind a high and deteriorating wall
of some possibly declining power, yet the branches now stretch out toward the
new plantationist, ready to take up the old plantationist's "burden" [ID]

Tensions were mounting between Austria and Italy as they pursued
overlapping imperialist objectives along the Adriatic shores of the Balkan
Peninsula

Forty years later, Fascist Italy took revenge
on Ethiopia as
it sought to carve a niche out for itself among the other European imperialist states
\\
*--LOOP on WW1a

<>1897ja28:Russia conducted first modern
census, Obshchii svod po Imperii rezul’tatov razrabotok dannykh pervoi vseobshchei perepisi
naseleniia, proizvedennoi 28 ianvaria 1897 goda
*--The Perepis' counted 129 million (13 million in cities)
[CF= RRC2,2#38] Translated title
page [W]
*--Eastview Press reprinted the census on CD and described "the first
and last census of the Russian Empire". Its initiator was
the famous Russian geographer and public figure Petr Semenov-Tian-Shanskii. He
lobbied three decades to make this census happen. To test and
improve the census questionnaire, he conducted an experimental census on his
family country estate, Gremiachka. The final version of the questionnaire was
designed for a household and included 14 questions. The announced goal of the
census was "to learn more about the population and to study it … to understand
precisely the various conditions of popular life". It was also promised that the
census would not "generate new taxes or other burden". The 1897 Census continues
to be the most authentic source on the number of Russia’s population and its
ethnic composition at the end of the 19th century
*--Red Book of
the Peoples of the Russian Empire provides population statistics for
almost 90 "minority" peoples of Russia

<>1898:France rocked by "Dreyfus Affair"
(with its origins in 1894 and final resolution not until 1906)

1894se:Evidence of treasonous communications of a French officer with German authorities were found

The culprit was Major Ferdinand Walsin-Esterhazy, scion of a French branch of a Hungarian aristocratic family

But he was an ardent Catholic and French patriot, well-connected in French upper-class circles

Thus a scape-goat was needed. A Jewish officer, Alfred Dreyfus, was framed, found guilty and sent to
exile on Devil's Island where it was expected he would soon die

French public protest grew stronger and found sympathetic support among a few high-ranking
military and civilian officials

At a first glance, the Affair pitted progressives (liberals and
socialists), humanists of all political stripes and defenders of Enlightenment and French Revolutionary
traditions against racists (anti-Jewish elements), militaristic patriots, Catholic Church activists, and a wide
spectrum of "right-wing" politicians

Closer examination reveals a painfully complex picture [CF=Harris below], but the larger European
meaning of the more than 10-year long Affair was a victory over anti-Semitism, over
Church ambitions to dominate politics, or at least national education, and over
chauvinistic [ID] military ambition and the
still active movement to restore the French monarchy

But it took more than ten years, and the way to victory was rocky =

1897:Esterhazy was put under pseudo-court martial where he was hastily cleared by fellow officers

Officers who questioned Dreyfus' guilt and the expanding political charade were demoted
and/or reassigned in punishment

1898ja13:Paris | Great French novelist Émile Zola's J'accuse exposed in a most public
way the injustices of the Dreyfus Affair [DPH:323-5]

The racist/nationalist press thought it was sufficient rebuttal to accuse Zola of being an "Italian"

Zola was himself put on trial, charged with political libel

Outside the courtroom a mob called for blood

Anti-Jewish riots broke out across France and across the Mediterranean in French Algeria

Among the many high-ranking military officers who took the stand against Zola was Chief of Staff General Charles
Le Mouton de Boisdeffre who identified support of the military as the central issue, as he put it = "confidence in the leaders of the army, in those who bear
the responsibility for national defense"

Zola was found guilty, spent a year in prison, and then went into political emigration in England

Rival volunteer associations formed = The Ligue des Droits de l'Homme [League of the Rights of Man (a clear evocation of the French Revolution)] arose
against the Ligue de la Patrie Française [League of the French Fatherland]

Charles Maurras denounced those whom he felt had subverted the nation, not just Jews but also
Freemasons, Protestants and other foreigners. Maurras argued that France -- like England, Germany and Russia -- should be ruled by a
monarchy

Influential Church leaders took this opportunity to reassert their desire to control national education

1899je03:French Appeals Court overturned Dreyfus' conviction

He was brought back from Devil's Island. A ravaged and deteriorated Dreyfus now faced another
trial

Military judges found him guilty again

The President of the French Republic took steps to forestall further appeals and to bring an end to the national
agony

He pardoned Dreyfus. Political expediency, rather than justice or chauvinistic patriotism, prevailed

In order to minimize the possibility of a military coup d'état, all military leaders responsible
for the persecution and prosecution of Dreyfus were pardoned

In another direction, the state took action against what it called "occult forces" in the Catholic Church

The most important consequence was the end of a century of post-Napoleonic state
financial support of the Catholic Church (and to a much lesser extend support of Protestant churches)

1908:Right-wing extremist assassin attempted to kill Dreyfus
\\
*--Ruth Harris, Dreyfus: Politics, Emotion, and the Scandal of the Century
*--Louis Begley, Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters | Begley emphasizes the weakness of reason against hysterical demands of emotionalism in public
life. He draws explicit parallels = Devil's Island and Guantánamo Bay, even the details of Dreyfus' shackles and those employed by USA on captured and
imprisoned "terrorists", the use of military rather than civilian courts, the danger of rigged justice under the influence of aggressive chauvinism, and
punishment of military officers who criticize all this

<>1898:German
Social Democrat Eduard Bernstein, Evolutionary Socialism
[TXT~ | Excerpt = CCC2,2:934-8 |
CCC3,2:971-5]
*--Bernstein was a moderate influence in the Second International
*1899:He published a reply to his critics, The Preconditions of Socialism
\\
*1994my06:TLS:27 | A summary of the main "revisions" that Bernstein is
thought to have made in Marxist socialist ideology and tactics [TXT]
||
*--LOOP on The Second International

<>1898:1902; Russian Riazan
Provincial peasant village the subject of intensive ethnographic
study designed by Olga Tian-Shanskaia and K.V. Nikolaevskii
*--Results were published as Village Life
in Late Tsarist Russia
*--In the half-century preceding the 1905 Revolution, Russian ethnography made
tremendous strides toward full and accurate ethnographic description of Russian
village life and culture. See Reeder (2nd
ed.):85-104 (agriculture-ritual songs) and 109-136 (love, marriage, family)
\\
*--Mironov,1:123-196 subjects the history of imperial Russian family life, rural and urban,
to close scrutiny

<>1898ja01:Spain launched a reform of Cuban
administration, designed to introduce self-rule to the island
*1898fe:Puerto Rico granted independence
*--No one much liked these seemingly progressive measures = It was too little too late for stumbling Spanish
imperialism

Without any evidence, USA officials and an expanding jingoist newspaper pressparticularly
the William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer sheetsblamed Spain for the murderous attack and called for
righteous revenge

One headline read, "THE WARSHIP MAINE SPLIT IN TWO BY ENEMYS SECRET INFERNAL MACHINE"

Only one authoritative investigation of this event was ever completed, that by Admiral H. G.
Rickover, How the Battleship Maine was Destroyed
[Resumé of TXT]

Rickover concluded that it was the US navys fault for poor management of fuel and powder storage on the big ship,
rather than some infernal Spanish "weapon of mass destruction"

Admiral Rickover's 1976 revelations about the true story of the Maine did not win him any friends in the
US military-industrial "community"

This explosive moment may be taken as the symbolic opening of a distinctly
imperialist era in USA foreign policy

The sinking of the Maine was a catastrophe that could be linked to the "evil-doing" of an international competitor

The hand of military-industrial adventurers and profit-seekers (some of whom were actually responsible for lax security
on the Maine) was freed of restraint

Manipulated public opinion fell in line behind ambitious USA imperialists

USA tried to insert itself between Spain and Cuba in defense of independence for the Cuban people

USA tried to purchase the island from Spain. In other words, it tried to
achieve "ownership" for itself, thus betraying Cuban independence
\\
*--Hugh Thomas [ID]
in 98ap23:NYR#45,7:10-12
*--Website related to US imperialism LOOP

<>1898mr:China leased Port Arthur to Russia, Kiaochow
to Germany and Kowloon to England

In this year in China, wide-spread traditionalism, anti-modernism, and
anti-imperialism helped create an anti-"West", anti-Christian movement called the Society of Righteous, Harmonious Fists
[better known as Boxers]

Imperialism was producing local revolutionary resistance to expansionist European states

Imperialism was also producing inter-state violence among these very expansionist European
states. Imperialism was coming home

<>1898mr01:Russian Social-Democratic Workers' Party
[SDs] opened first congress in Minsk
*--The SDs issued a proclamation, written from a Marxist
perspective [VSB,3:709-10]

<>1898ap10:Egypt |
Eyewitness accounts of the English attack southward against the Sudanese at the Atbara River

However, Japan offered Russia free hand in Manchuria for Japanese free hand in Korea

That initiative failed, but Nishi-Rosen Agreement pledged both sides to provide no military or
financial advisers to Korea w/o prior agreement, and Russia recognized Japans
preponderant economic interests in Korea

<>1898jy01:Cuba | Rough Riders with Teddy
Roosevelt fought the Battle of El Caney
*--James Creelman described the battle and the USA author Steven Crane described the
aftermath [Eye:407-9]
*--Roosevelt had recently resigned as Assistant Secretary of the Navy (in part responsible
for the vigorous expansion of US naval readiness for war, and for the way the Maine was
loaded with fuel and powder [ID])
*--He now decked himself out in a new Brooks Brothers uniform and charged onto the pages of history

<>1898oc14:Moscow Art Theatre founded by Konstantin
Stanislavskii [real name=Alekseev] and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko
*--Russian homepage
*--VIDEOTAPE history of the Moscow Art Theatre
*--Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, with his sparse language and quotidian themes, seemed at odds with
contemporary avant-garde trends in the fine arts
*1899:1900; Maksim Gorky (1868:1936; real name "Aleksei
Maksimovich Peshkov"; "Gor'kii" means "bitter") had been a struggling provincial
writer (born in Nizhnii Novgorod). He now made the acquaintance of Chekhov and
the great novelist Leo Tolstoy and, with his distinctly radical social and
political ideas, he broke into the capital-city big-time. A few years later,
Gorky wrote brilliant memoirs of his early acquaintance with
Chekhov [TXT#1 |
TXT#2]],
Leo Tolstoy
[TXT],
Aleksandr Blok and Leonid Andreev.
[Webpage devoted to Gorky]
*1902:Moscow Art Theatre production of Gorky's play, THE LOWER DEPTHS [Na dne]
won international fame. At some odds with the prevailing sensibilities of the
Russian "Silver Age", Maksim Gorky
dealt with the Russian lower classes, the laboring poor of the neglected Russian
backwaters, and did so in an increasingly "realistic" or descriptive style
\\
*--W. H. Bruford, Chekhov and His Russia: A Sociological Study (1947)

1901:Two years later, Carnegie merged with United States Steel and retired

In retirement, he funded hundreds of local libraries across the USA,
supported public education, and world peace. He endowed the Carnegie Corporation
of New York, with $125 million for use in support of various charitable causes

<>1899fe08:St.Petersburg University hit by student demonstrations
*--Over the next three years, the student movement spread to other institutions of higher
learning and intensified [VSB,3:739-41]
*--University student unrest was a harbinger of the 1905 Revolution,
and the tsarist state perceived it as such

<>1899mr:Russian political
exile Vladimir Lenin published The Development of Capitalism
in Russia [W TXT],
based on careful analysis of Zemstvo statistics on the village-level
and region-level agricultural economy

Lenin's main contribution here was to assert that peasants were not a distinct social class
but were a complex and transitional social formation

There were three sorts of peasants in this account

"Rich peasants" (kulaks) were akin to a social class considered by
Marxists to be genuine, the bourgeoisie

"Poor peasants" were akin to another genuine social class, proletariat

"Middle peasants" made up the rest of the rural population in this analysis

The curious thing here is that this third, very large but theoretically
inchoate portion of the Russian population (a large majority) who were neither "rich" nor "poor"
held the future of Russia in their hands

Everything depended on which direction this unstable middle element moved
as it fell into orbit with one of the two authentic social classes

It had to move either into the ranks of the "rich" (bourgeoisie) or the "poor"
(proletariat)

Peasants thus were granted no intrinsic
status in this socially dualistic Leninist world-view, based as it was on an
orthodox understanding of Karl Marx's teachings
\\
*--David Mitrany, Marx Against the Peasants

<>1899mr20:Canada, Ottawa | Down and out D.H. Davies
described how he had a foot severed while trying to jump a train [Eye:409-11]

"Report of the Minister of Finance to His Majesty on the Necessity of Formulating and
Thereafter Steadfastly Adhering to a Definite Program of a Commercial and Industrial
Policy of the Empire" [Translated with an introductory article, by T. H. Von Laue,
*1954mr:JMH#26,1:60-74 | TXT excerpts
| Other published excerpts= RRC2,2#37 | VSB,3:757-9]

Witte was working hard to convince the Emperor to support the "Witte System" [ID]

Witte placed great emphasis on shortage of investment capital to promote
vigorous expansion of the coal
and oil sectors of the modernizing Russian Imperial economy

Witte's views of Russian imperialist foreign policy were consistent
with his policy of economic modernization [VSB,3:693-6]

1899je03:French government seemed to awaken rather late, but very perceptively, to what
was happening in China, and reacted with alarm at Russian/English
agreement on "spheres of influence" that allowed Russia to build railroads north
of the Great Wall, and England, south [BNE:180-3]

<>1899jy:USA President McKinley appointed Elihu Root, a
prominent member of the USA imperialist party, to the War Department for the purposes of administering the islands taken
from Spain in the recent war [W]

Elihu Root (1847-1937) was a corporation lawyer in the service of powerful NY businesses =

In the previous year, McKinley hesitated to pursue imperialist war against Spain

For this reason, Teddy Roosevelt compared his fortitude to a chocolate éclair

Now the US President was on board the imperialist project and ready to enjoy the fruits of victory
over old imperialist Spain

1899no21:McKinley interview outlined justifications for US imperialist expansion, recapitulating
arguments long familiar to old Europe [BNE:183-4]

<>1899se06:USA proposed "Open Door"
policy[TXT] to Germany, Russia, England, Japan, Italy
and France, one of the first US foreign policy initiatives to gain immediate international attention, if not assent

USA Secretary of State John Hay was the author of the "Open Door" doctrine

John Hay (1838-1905) began his public career as Secretary to President Abraham
Lincoln whom he had met when both practiced law in Springfield IL

After marrying into a wealthy Cleveland family of financiers, he devoted his life to
travel and literature

In 1879 he became Assistant Secretary of State and moved to WDC, where he was an important member of the cultural/intellectual group that
formed up around Henry Adams

He served as Secretary of State from 1898 until his death

In these years USA sponsored a "trust company" to build a railroad
across China, Canton-Hankow-Peking [Beijing]

The concession was handed over to the American China Development Co. controlled by
prominent USA capitalists

Russia sensed competitive pressure from USA businessmen in northern China
(Manchuria) and suspected official support from the US government

Suspicions deepened when USA-Japan agreements became known and rapprochement
between USA and England matured

The larger significance of USA Secretary of State John Hay
at the turn of the 20th century derived from
the way he helped re-orient early 20th-century US policy toward international outreach, IE=Imperialism

USA was forging a new closeness to the "mother culture" of the ex-enemy Great Britain (England)

USA was in fact picking up what Kipling called "the white man's burden" [ID]

England was showing some signs of fatigue, and USA was showing ample signs of potential imperialist
vigor [EG]

In a sense, the Hay re-orientation squelched the ambitious hopes of certain Englishmen to repossess their
American colonies, lost over the previous century [EG]

The intellectual impact of the US sea-change is reflected in the now widely
employed abstract unifying concept "The West"

The concept is reflected, for example, in a curricular innovation that spread across US
university campuses
in the early 20th-century, "Western Civ"

The idea of "Western Civ" is based on a transnational notion that Classical
Athenian Greeks and Romans of the
great empire were closely related to US

"Western Civ" was fashioned persuasively into a story of a vast European
(mainly northwest European and, for some, Anglo-Saxon European) mission of global progress and civilization

In USA the concept provided a refutation of the provincial New-World democratism or geo-egalitarianism implied, for
example, in the Turner Thesis [ID] and other anti-East-Coast enthusiasms of
the Progressive Era

USA efforts to cool down European imperialist rivalry, such as the "Open Door" initiative,
did not work, perhaps in part because these efforts were always accompanied by efforts to
enhance US imperialist advantage

As for Russia, it felt surrounded by "The West" and didn’t want
to "open its doors" to romping/stomping "Western" self-assertion

The war pitted two European colonial peoples against one another, the English and the Dutch

"Boer" in Dutch and Afrikaans (a Dutch colonial dialect) means "farmer"
and is pronounced like the English word for an oppresively uninteresting person

The Boer War was, for the English, an effort to grab -- and for the Boers to hold
onto -- the lands of indigenous African peoples at the southern tip of the continent

1899no:German Social Democratic leader Karl Kautsky wrote about the
Boer War, emphasizing how European imperialism in the wide world was suffocating liberalism and socialism
at home [Daly.SDs,ch#6 "The War in South Africa]

In Kautsky's view, the great French Revolution launched two dominant trends of European civilization =

Socialism, which Kautsky thought of as the original liberal political tradition
evolving in natural rhythm with 19th-century industrial modernization

Imperialism, which Kautsky thought of as the desperate and
ultimately futile effort of the economic ruling class in industrializing
Europe to sustain itself in its waning years of political and financial
dominance at home via exploitation of the wider non-European world

The Boer War roused Kautsky to the fear that the forces of militant imperialism were growing stronger and
were deployed, in a sense, as much against domestic socialism (posing patriotism against the home-grown threat
of wage-labor) as against indigenous peoples abroad in the pursuit of profitable resources

1900sp:J.E. Neilly described civilian suffering in the course of the Boer War
[E-TXT |
Eye:412-13]

The direct grappling of two European imperialist cultures with one another at the peripheries of
colonical dominance, rather than solely with indigenous peoples of Africa,
was an ominous premonition of WW1 [ID]

So also was the powerful mechanized cruelties put on display in the Boer War

<>1900:Austrian
psychologist Sigmund Freud published Interpretation
of Dreams[TXT]
*--Freud was at the beginning of a public career that transformed modern ideas about how the
mind works [CCC2,2:1061 | CWC:155 | CCS:73,623]
*--JANUS COLLECTION
*--While "Western" power shot outward, "Western" consciousness ducked inward

<>1900:English mathematician Karl Pearson delivered
lecture "National Life from the Standpoint of Science"
[ID], in which he explained the
meaning of social Darwinism and expounded the cause of eugenics [ID],
with emphasis on selective breeding of the very best "stock" [PWT2:215-17]
*--In voguish contemporary scientistic terminology, Pearson
justified the re-imposition of medieval concepts of inherent status by birth, as well
as European racism and imperialism
*--Pearson was proud of his "free-thinker" reputation and his association with the English socialist movement
*--Eugenics was at the beginning of a sorrowful career through the first half of the 20th century
*--Hop ahead a half century

<>1900je:German Imperial Naval Act (#2) passed with goal of building
vast, modern oceanic navy to rival English dominance of the high seas

<>1900je:China | Boxer
Rebellion [W] occupied capital city
Peking [then called Peiping; now Beijing]
\\
*--Robert Bickers, The Scramble for China (2011)
*--Joseph Esherick, The Origins of the Boxer Uprising (1987)
*--Cooper.PACIFISM gives special attention to
this ezample of overseas imperialist practice and its contribution to the
brutalization of Europe in WW1 = [TXT]
*--LOOP on WW1a

Extending the reactionary trends of father Alexander III's reign into the young son Nicholas' reign,
reactionaries took steps to strip Zemstvos of the authority to maintain warehousing of cereal grains and
other provisioning against possible future famine (such had so seriously devastated
Russia one decade earlier)

Officials were forced to reverse themselves in the coming winter (1901) when famine once again
stalked the Russian countryside

In this crisis, Zemstvos had to be called back into action to perform essential public
welfare functions which the state was unwilling and unable to perform

<>1900jy04:USA, KS City Democratic Party National
Convention. William Jennings Bryan delivered speech [TXT]
against US imperialism
*--The American "two-party" system was under great strain to accommodate the several varieties of political interest and
opinion growing within the old political party system in the Progressive Era

<>1900se19:Russian Chief Gendarme,
Count Viacheslav Plehve, received and eventually approved a secret
report by Sergei Zubatov, Chief of the Moscow bureau of the Okhrana [secret anti-revolutionary police]

As a result, state-sponsored labor unions were created in Moscow, a policy known
as "police socialism", lasting three years
[VSB,3:697-8 | WRH3:466-7]

Police Socialism can be understood as an official reactionary measure against
growing unrest among workers

But it was much more than that. It also harmonized perfectly well with a long-term and
sanctioned relationship of state to society

Two editions of this fabulous novel were published by Norton with EXTENSIVE
historical documentation about Europe and the Belgian Congo [ID], plus critical
commentary [1st ed][2nd ed]

Contemporary socialist critique of European imperialism in the Congo
can be compared with Conrad's complex views on the matter [BNE:187-90]

A great "English" writer, born in Poland,
gives one of many indications that European high civilization transcended nation-state borders
and adds a special historical nuance to Conrad's choice of topics, the brutalization of a
grand European civilization as a result of imperialism and colonialism
\\
*--Mary Ann Gillies, The Professional Literary Agent in Britain, 1880-1920 | A new middleman entered into
the process of (increasingly "the business of") English literary production. The literary agent stepped
between writers and their presses/publishers | This book concentrates on agents A.P. Watt and J.B.
Pinker. Watt developed "agent’s clauses" in agreements with publishers, settled "agent-client
agreements" on writers, and sold copyrights. Pinker served as agent for Joseph Conrad, as well as for
Rebecca West and D.H. Lawrence

He now went even further, questioning the applicability to Russia of standard
social democratic tactics as devised in the Europe-wide movement centered on the Second International
and practiced among most other Russian SDs, those whom he would soon label Mensheviks ["minoritarians"]
||
*--LOOP on The Second International

Lenin explained why the better future of Russia depended on the creation of a
disciplined cadre party organization

A comparison of "What's to be Done?" with Lenin's last sustained piece of political
writing two decades later, "Better Fewer, But Better",
gives a simple two-point measure of his political evolution

Lenin, with considerable justification, claimed to represent Karl Marx's original recommendations
to Russian revolutionists, thus he claimed to be the only authentic Marxist

It is worth considering also the degree to which he might have justifiably
claimed to inherit the traditions of oppositional politics within the broader
Russian political culture [documents on this question in Late Marx...]

Lenin never openly claimed the inheritance from earlier decades of Russian political opposition because he did
not want to be associated with the widely discredited legacy of "Russian populism"

Nor did he wish to be confused with the large rival Social Revolutionary Party which
did claim to be the heir to the legacy of revolutionary populism

Lenin "went along" with the standard Social Democratic ridicule heaped on earlier movements

Nonetheless, he mined them carefully, for lessons about the peculiar features of the
Russian "mode of production" and the political tactics those features recommended to all,
whatever their ideologies

As the general revolutionary crisis intensified
in the first years of the 20th century, Russian SDs
began to split into two factions, in fact two political parties,
eventually to be called Bolsheviks ("majoritarians", though they were the minority on
all but a very few issues) and Mensheviks ("minoritarians", though they were the larger
part of the party)

Menshevik leaders were Yulii Martov, Plekhanov and
other more moderate social democrats who represented Russian variations on the general
European, labor-leaning, "left-wing liberal" or "radical liberal"
trend associated primarily with Eduard Bernstein
[VSB,3:713-14]

Russian Marxism expressed itself in a variety of interpretations of
Russian realities

The party was caught by surprise when the 1905 Revolution
broke out, and it thus played only a marginal role

The SW half is frequently labeled with an equally indefinite term "Near-East"

The NE half is frequently labeled with another indefinite term "Central-Asia"

The terms "Middle-East", "Near-East", and "Central-Asia" are
perfectly "prescriptive" [fabricated in order to gather and label]

These terms are merely arbitrary approximations of peoples and places

They, like another ubiquitous compass-term "The West", are the products of, first, European
and, then, world-wide power competition

This power competition may be defined as control exercised by expansive sovereign
nation-state "metropols" over vulnerable and overlapping territories and resources located on near-by or
distant "peripheries" [ID theoretical terms "metropol"
and "periphery"]

The two were sympathetic to the rising Anglo-Saxon racism sweeping over the US establishment in these exciting
years of Progressive Era debate on the question of projecting US power across the seas

<>1902ja30:Anglo-Japanese Alliance
\\
One historian of Japan wrote that this Anglo-Japanese Alliance, plus Russo-Japanese
War, made Japan very "Western" and, at the same time, very "anti-Western". Pressure from Europe and US,

brought revenge, self-confidence and a sense of mission. Japan was set on the
road that was to make her in the following forty years an exemplar of Western civilization, transplanted;
a champion of Asia against "The West"; and the megalomaniac
builder of an empire overseas [Beasley,MHJ:173]

<>1902mr26 (NS=ap08):Chinese/Russian agreement said
Russian troops would leave Manchuria after 18 months, but they stayed on the
Manchurian frontier, now a bone
of contention between Russia, China and Japan (with increasing USA economic
presence and constant English and German diplomatic entanglement)
\\
*--LOOP on WW!a

<>1902ap:Russian Interior Minister D. S. Sipiagin
was assassinated
*--Sipiagin's assassin was a member of the newly organized mass Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries [SRs],
which from the beginning served as home for a group dedicated to violent struggle by means of terror
*--The group was called "The Battle Organization" [Boevaia organizatsiia |
Two-paragraph ID]
*--The specter of political terror again raised its head twenty
years after the assassination of Alexander II
*--Notorious statist reactionary Police Chief Viacheslav Plehve replaced Sipiagin and was the
last gasp of official reactionary policy
\\
*--Jonathan Daly [ID] helps explain how harsh
and arbitrary bureaucratic (rather than judicial) incarceration and punishment
can provoke "terrorism" [Begin
TXT w/first full pgf]
*--Amy Knight, "Female Terrorists in the Russian Socialist Revolutionary Party" [TXT]

Chernigov Province police reported on political "propaganda" among local peasants =

In one or another region there appear unknown young people, who pass through in railroad
trains and in carriages, or on horseback along country roads, or on foot through
the villages. They scatter revolutionary books and pamphlets about.... The books
and pamphlets are eagerly read by the rural populace and ... are passed on from
one person to the next, without any thought of evil. In some cases public
readings of them have been delivered to whole crowds of peasants. When peasants
learn the contents of the literature, rumors spread among them about imminent
partition of proprietors' lands. Relations with local landowners become more or
less strained

Police did not identify agitators, nor had they apprehended any. Local
police resources were limited, so it might be best "to take measures to alert
peasants themselves to seize agitators and hand them over to authorities and
thus nip the evil in the bud" [Based on Page:53]

At the same time more constructive measures were taken under the leadership
of Finance Minister Sergei Witte, who argued that "the evil" perceived
among restless villagers perhaps did not reside in scattered books and pamphlets but in
conditions of rural life

Witte created local committees of the Special Conference on the Needs of Agriculture in 49 provinces

All-Russian assemblies were instructed to discuss the agricultural crisis [MR&C2:347]

1903:Aleksandr Rittikh summarized early deliberations of the Special Conference
and defended peasant practice of periodic redistribution of land within the village
commune [VSB,3:761]

<>1902je08:1905; Germany, Stuttgart | Russian
émigré publication "Liberation" [Osvobozhdenie] was for three years edited by Petr Struve
and expressed Russian strenuously oppositional liberal political viewpoint of the
Union of Liberation [VSB,3:721-4]

The journal was published abroad rather than in Russia because censorship
and police suppression of political movements made domestic publication impossible

Soon the political organization, more or less a political party, was able to operate in Russia
itself. The Russian old regime was sagging

In this year a Saint Petersburg publisher issued two-volume Russian-language
edition of Locke's Two Treatises of Government[ID],
the classic, and now pan-European, statement of liberal political principles

<>1903ap06:ap07; The Kishinev Pogrom
[TXT]. Jews suffered one of the most severe of several pogroms [maltreatment and
even murder at the hands of irregular gangs who invaded and terrorized Jewish settlements]
[VSB,3:698-701 | PWT2:205-8]

Kishinev is the central city in a largely Ukrainian and Moldavian
(Romanian-speaking) region, sometimes referred to
as "Right-bank Ukraine". Today it is capital of Moldova, but
for almost a century it had been part of the Russian Empire and would eventually become a component of the
Soviet Union

It is possible to see a parallel in the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in USA, but a difficult interpretive maneuver
is called for = both a connection and a distinction must be made between "official" and "public" attitudes and behavior,
between governmental tactics and outlook, on the one hand, and popular attitudes and actions, on the other

For over a decade, action groups like "Pan-German League" had been urging expansion
of German technical and industrial might eastward toward Pacific waters and southward into AfroAsia
[E-TXT]

German-Ottoman relations quickened as German diplomats, bankers and military leaders perceived
an opportunity to project their power along rails through Istanbul to Baghdad

The railroad agreement granted extraction and transportation rights to natural resources 12 miles
on either side of the tracks

It also granted marketing rights to German goods in the northern heart of Ottoman Turkish Arabia

In these same years, Ottoman-German cooperation created the Hejaz Railroad
[Wki], from Damascus in the north to the holy city Medina
in the south [Hejaz indicates the western half of what would after WW1 be known as Saudi Arabia]

So we see that German-Ottoman railroad cooperation stretched track west to east and then north to south,
a simple rail network of profound implication for the future of AfroAsian
territories of The Ottoman Empire

It was now clear that the railroad could be turned to imperialist and military uses

Imperialist and military uses were often at odds with the needs of domestic national
industrial might and economic prosperity

Liberal economic arrangements had come to dominate domestic policy in European nations

But these liberal European domestic arrangements showed very little resemblance to those imposed on non-European peoples

As the 20th century opened, Europeans were beginning to feel the bite of militarist statism in their own realms

Imperialism was "coming home"

European imperialism (and not just Russian imperialism) forged close ties between military establishments and
large economic enterprises

These including expanding transnational banking and financial
organizations

These organizations frequently operated in stark contradiction to standard laissez-faire ideas of Adam
Smith [ID] and other liberal political economists

Was liberalism coming to an end as a general European experience just as liberalism gained
a sudden new energy in Russia?
\\
*--Eric Rauchway on early history of USA railroads [TXT]
*--Continue LOOP on railroad
*--LOOP on WW1a

Party rejected Lenin's draft of Party rules [DPH:294-5] Some saw a connection
between the way a political party governed itself and the way it might govern a whole
nation [TXT]

1903au:Russian SDs agreed with difficulty on a single party
platform [W]
[DIR2:394-9 | DIR3:426-31]

Lenin's concepts of "democratic centralism" and his insistence
on "managerial" manipulation of the larger political
association did not harmonize with standard Social Democratic notions of the
future democratic and egalitarian order

<>1903no:Russia | Union of Zemstvo Constitutionalists [Soiuz
Zemtsev-Konstitutsionalistov] founded
*--The liberal movement continued
organize itself
within Zemstvo institutions
*--It appeared now as a political party,
not abroad but in Russia itself

<>1903no18:USA treaty
authorized seizure of Panama Canal
Zone [TXT]
*--South American nation Columbia had the Zone cut out of its hide by a USA sponsored separatist revolution
\\
*--LOOP on WW1a